Home Office Ikea Hack

Now that I’m working from home, it was time to upgrade the home office. (It’s also well past time to start writing on my own blogs again, but let’s not dwell on that).

The space in my home office was a bit challenging. There are baseboards for heat along two of the four walls, and on the other two there’s not quite enough space for many larger corner desks, but the smaller corner desks looked too small. We explored having a custom built-in put together, but ultimately got inspired by Ikea Hackers to come up with our own solution.

It was fairly simple, as Ikea Hacks go:

Hemnes desk minus one pedestal, plus Hemnes sofa table,  plus glass top.
Hemnes desk minus one pedestal, plus Hemnes sofa table, plus glass top.

Basically what you need from Ikea is a Hemnes Desk, a Hemnes Sofa Table. We then added custom cut glass tops, which you can get from any local glass company.

hemnes

The hack part is in assembling the Hemnes desk. Put together one of the two pedestals (one is designed to be covered by a door, and is good as a CPU cabinet; the other is designed to hold a file drawer – you can use whichever one you want). Then, instead of assembling the other pedestal, you need to cut down one of the two sides, and combine the two sides next to each other to form a back for the desk:

What were the two sides for the right pedestal of the desk becomes the back
What were the two sides for the right pedestal of the desk becomes the back

The sides are normally 24 1/4″ long from front to back; I cut one of the sides down to being only 20 5/8″ long, in the process cutting off one of the legs. You may want to measure to fit, though rather than relying on these measurements. Then when the desk is lined up so that it meets the sofa table perpendicular in the corner, the desktop is at the same height as the top of the sofa table, and the newly-made back runs between the pedestal and the sofa table.

You can see the holes in the underside of the desktop where it was supposed to sit on top of the right pedestal – but unless you’re crawling around on the floor you won’t see them in normal use.

Here's where the back meets the sofa table - secured at the back and at the top where the desktop meets
Here’s where the back meets the sofa table – secured at the back and at the top where the desktop meets the table.

I secured the back to the left pedestal and to the Hemnes sofa table at the right, then reinforced underneath where the front edge of the desktop meets the sofa table, given there is no front leg for the desktop.

The cable routing holes in the desk aligned between left pedestal and desk back
The cable routing holes in the desk aligned between left pedestal and desk back

The result is a nice corner desk, with lots of accessible storage in the sofa table cubbies, and a cpu door in the pedestal to the left. You lose the “cable shelf” the desk is designed to have, but I’ve been able to (mostly) hide the cables behind the new back partition.

Table Meeting Desk