I’ve been working on the drawings for how we’re going to modify the kneewall in the front of E’s room to turn a portion of it into a full sized desk. I may still tweak the length of the desk a bit, but this should give you a general idea of what we’re thinking. The piece will bolt into the slanted wall at the front of the house and into the top of the knee wall. And if the room changes up again it can be removed, the holes patched up, and no one will be any the wiser.
The height of the new desk will be 29″ and it will have about 15″ of kneespace which is at the generous end of the range for comfortable working. We already own the chair (plus three of its brothers) – they were my first and only Craigslist purchase to date. Score.
The desk will consist of three components – a writing / work surface, hanging supply drawers, and a series of brackets to hold the whole thing up. The brackets will also provide slots below the desk surface to hold stacks of paper and notebooks – something we have lots of in this room.
I put a few things on the top for scale purposes. She does not have a laptop, nor is she getting one. But the laptop in the model is the size of M’s – it’s a larger one – so we do know that she’ll have more than enough room for one in the future, or any other kind of school project / notebook / poster she might be working on. Even with the inward slant of the front wall she has more than enough room for some books, some writing supplies, a table lamp, etc. And many of the picture books that are sitting on the kneewall now will move down to the living room bookshelves.
All of these images were generated in Sketchup which is my program of choice for designing these kind of projects. M and I are working on my sister’s house addition in Sketchup and (after asking her permission), I’ll post some of that work in the coming few weeks prior to a looming deadline. I’ve also used this program to design the library shelves which are also looming. Hooray for looming!
P.S. Remember the desk is a birthday surprise!