March 2025 - Adding Wheels to My Desk

I find myself never completely done adding stuff to my room, or changing stuff. It's perhaps an indicator that I do need more space, against my initial judgment. Seeing as living arrangements are not so easily changed, I tend to focus on changing minor things that annoy me. One of these is my main desk, which has developed into a two-tiered monstrosity that is both difficult to move, and also a little bit too low.

It's really a question of two centimeters at most, so the fix would be done with a number of commercial solutions. I happened to have some cuts of wood available left from a different endeavor, and heavy load wheels are at not expensive. In my case, they came with screws that were just short of the depth of the wood.

I did note down the measurements wrong, initially resulting in one cut that was too narrow. The remainder of the board happened to have a good width, albeit it less tight than its sister cut had. The table has an L-shape, supported by two storage units and one regular pair of aluminium supports, so each of these structures requires a board with 4 wheels each. The width is really only important for the two corners with storage units. The width of the other is just wide enough to support free movement of the wheels (and keeping the board itself from tipping over).

I did not saw the cuts myself. There was cutting to be done anyway, and those two additional cuts across the depth of the board didn't make much of a difference in terms of time and effort afforded the original purpose. I had to place the screws myself, which in my book was enough work for a person without powertools. Each edge had to be sanded a little, but seeing as the board is made of pressed and glued chips, there was never going to be an entirely smooth edge, and I just had to sand off the roughest edges. It was not going to get better than that without gluing some plastic finish over it. Since there's no water and very little moisture in contact with it, I figure it's fine to just leave it open. Perhaps I'll staple fabric over it, if I find myself scratching against the open edges.

Under normal circumstances, just placing the table on three different rolling platforms would not really facilitate easy movement of the table without the platform shifting underneath it. Here the weight of the thing does most of the work for me. Otherwise I might have had to think about grooves or the like, but it turns out there's either the weight of a second table with several bottles and tech on it, or that the monitor setup on it.

This project was mostly tedious to plan, and not difficult to execute. Still, I might have waited to do it for another while if I hadn't put an end-of-month deadline on it. I mostly built the solution out of stuff that I had accumulated naturally, and so the extra height the table gained is somewhat imprecise, significantly more than is technically required. However, now I can push my swivel chair flush against the table, and when working at the table, it makes me coincidentally fix my shrimpy posture that might have been a problem eventually.