I Built A Goddamn Writing Desk With My Bare Hands And You Can Too

The first rule of desk club is make your own goddamn desk.

Ernest Hemingway once said: "Boy am I drunk." If you ever wonder why you're not a famous writer, the answer, my friends, is talent. But also the lack of a goddamn writing desk.

If, like me, you're a goddamn writer who just moved into a tiny east London flat, you'll need a new desk. If, like me, you have no money, your options are thus: Scour vintage markets for an overpriced but ultimately shitty desk, concede the last vestiges of your soul and visit Ikea, or build yourself a goddamn writing desk.

I did the last one. And I'm going to show you how. I'm not a desk expert – I'm barely qualified to sit at one – but you can think of me as the Gary Busey of desk-building: I have no idea what’s going on and Jennifer Garner is afraid of me.

Daniel Dalton / BuzzFeed

Get some timber.

There are several ways to get timber, depending on how broke a goddamn writer you are: You can find it, forage it, steal it, or get something vintage from Etsy, which most of you will want to do because you're all goddamn hipsters.

I don't have time for that shit, so I bought mine from a shop.

I bought redwood, because that's what they had. I learned that the name redwood is a lie. I suppose it has a reddish quality if you squint, or have blood in your eyes, but it's mostly beige/yellow.

Because I have a tiny flat and am overly judgmental, I need a fairly shallow desk. I opted for two lengths of redwood that I could fix together to make a desktop 450mm wide. That's 45cm, or just wide enough to catch my falling tears as I fail at life.

Daniel Dalton / BuzzFeed

Sand that shit.

The man at the shop cut the wood for me, and the ends of the wood were all rough from the saw. You can leave them rough, or you can take this shit seriously and fucking sand them.

If you can't be bothered, it's like Rodney Dangerfield famously said, “you should have gone to Ikea, jackass".

Daniel Dalton / BuzzFeed

Here is a macro photo of a sanding block.

My camera has a macro setting, isn't that cool. I got this sanding block from my local DIY shop – it has many different sides, like my ex, Julie. All of them terrible.

By which I mean they each have a different grade of sandpaper. It's helpful if you're the kind of person who walks into a DIY store and cries, because it covers every sanding-related base.

Daniel Dalton / BuzzFeed

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