Desk With White Oak Waterfall Edge

Bob Barker and I decided to make a new desk for my wife. It took some time, but after some back and forth and months of procrastination, we came up with a design. We decided on a white oak top with a waterfall edge on one side. The other side has a cabinet with two drawers. My wife wanted one drawer to be a file cabinet and the other to hold her printer. The other important consideration was to hide the numerous cords she needs for all her equipment.

With the design set, we got to work. The cabinet is made with Baltic birch plywood. I was using cheaper plywood recently, but decided to pay more for less hassle with this project. The top drawer needed to be a tray with a higher piece up front to hold the drawer face in place. That took a little bit of free hand cuts, but ended up going well.

The biggest issue was the waterfall edge for the top. I needed to glue up a panel with pieces of white oak that were 10ft long. I have done up to 8ft long panels, so figured it would go just as smoothly. It did not. Adding the extra track extension to the length ended up creating some bows in the cut. No matter what I did, there was going to be multiple gaps in the panel. That was just unacceptable. I thought about abandoning the waterfall edge, or accepting that the grain pattern will not be as continuous as I intended, but those options just felt like accepting failure. In the end, I found a fellow woodworker on makerbook.io who had a jointer I could use. It ended up being a great experience.

I had a few other bumps during the build, like cutting a dado on the wrong side of a drawer, measuring my drawer width wrong, and getting my blade pinched when doing the miter cut. But I stayed flexible, worked through the problems and made it to the finish line.

My wife loves the finished desk, and it goes great with the DJ station/built-ins we recently made. If you want to see the build, the like to the video is below.

Full build video on my YouTube channel: https://youtu.be/Zw8gDGjKkNk