An IKEA hack stacked plywood desk for Ari’s very, very slow room makeover!

Putting your own top on Ikea’s Alex drawer units to make a desk is not a revolutionary idea, as a quick glance at Pinterest will tell you. But it is, nevertheless, what we did, and we put a bit of our own twist on it by using stacked plywood for the top.

You can, of course, buy a work surface at Ikea that will go with the base drawers, but making our own made it a bit cheaper and, IMO, a lot nicer, and it was a quick and easy project. Win, win, win.

Dave and I have both scoured our phones and can find no pictures whatsoever of the process here, but probably it’s easy enough to follow without pictures. We bought the cabinets first so that we could be sure of our measurements and also so that we could see them physically in his room to figure out just how big we wanted to make the top (another benefit of making your own top is that you can make it as big or small as you want).

We bought a 4×8 sheet of 3/4 inch birch plywood from Home Depot. We’ve used this plywood before, most notably for our game table in the basement, and I really love the grain in it (and the natural color, but we opted for a dark stain this time).

At this point I would like to tell you what stain color we used, but I can’t find the can anywhere in the garage and I don’t remember! I’m sorry I’m such a bad blogger! We did this months ago, and I really thought I’d get around to doing this post while it was fresher in my mind. Anyway, pick out whatever color stain looks the prettiest to YOU.

We ended up making our desk top 63 inches long, but, of course, you can do make it as long or short as you want. We wanted a big surface area but also needed it to fit well into the available space, so we kind of made it as long as was reasonable. So once we cut the plywood to size, we had 2 pieces that were 63 inches long and 27 1/2 inches deep (to fit the cabinets), both out of that one sheet of plywood. Dave used his table saw to cut it, but says that, in retrospect, he should have just used his circular saw.

To stack the two pieces together, he first used liquid nails, then clamped them together and screwed them together from the bottom (making sure, of course, to pick screws that would not go all the way through the second board). And then we put the (very heavy!) top on the base cabinets. And Ari had a desk! Just in time for him to go back to college and not get to use it much! But then he came back home, and he’s still home for now, because it’s bit of a weird year. As you might have noticed. Anyway.

So right now the top is just resting on the bases with nothing holding them there. This works fairly well, since the top is pretty heavy, but it does slide around a bit, so we’re thinking of some kind of velcro strips maybe to keep it from slipping at all. We could just attach it with liquid nails or something, but then I think it would be just about impossible to move out of the room without sawing it in half. It’s a big desk.

So aside from small stuff like the stain and liquid nails, the cabinets were $79 each and the plywood was around $50–so $210 for a very big desk with lots of storage.

That Sandy Koufax print that we got on Etsy is pretty much the only decorative thing we’ve bought so far for this room. Some stuff from the old version of his room will probably stick around, though. I’m hoping to pick up the pace. Why right now, as I type, Dave and Ari are upstairs assembling Ari’s new bed. Which perhaps I’ll post about next!

List of things to do still in Ari’s room:

finish assembling bed

some kind of bookshelf (I have ideas!)

paint dresser that’s going in there

bedding

stuff on walls

paint chair

(and, after looking at these pictures, new outlet covers)

maybe you would like to pin this?