Making progress…

So I’ve been working on building myself a walnut desktop for a sit/stand computer desk. The materials for the top actually cost less than the walnut veneered Karlby from IKEA… which is how I wound up on this path.

The Karlby is interesting because I’d never seen a veneer simulate end grain before; it was enough to convince me that it was a solid countertop at first. A little bit of research showed it was, in fact, a veneer over chipboard and my local hardwood dealer was running a sale on walnut, so I decided to go with the real thing.

Initial layout of my boards, trying to visualize placement.

A quick defense of the Karlby: as of the date I’m writing this, IKEA says it is a walnut veneer. I’ve seen some Reddit posts discussing color changes from certain years, saying the stain changed, etc. I can’t confirm that, but it might be actual walnut. More than that, this post over at Dans le Lakehouse has some fantastic photos of a Karlby cross-section that show how thick the veneer is. Honestly, buying the IKEA unit isn’t a bad idea for a lot of people and if I’d have known how thick the veneer was, I might’ve just done that.

So I was able to buy around 24 board feet of 5/4 walnut for fifty bucks less than the Karlby, and apparently that’s what I thought 30-or-so hours of my time was worth. It’s been a long and sometimes frustrating process to glue the boards up into a panel (I don’t have a jointer) but all the time and effort has been worth it. Final assembly is done, and last Saturday I cut it down to its final dimension. Across a six foot width, I somehow got this thing to within 1/32 of inch to square… which is square for my purposes!

Sanding has taken longer than I hoped- I was really hoping to use that smoothing plane and skip sanding, but I still have a lot to learn about setting up a plane because I did more harm than good with some nasty tearout. So I spent many long hours with 80-grit passes, and should have one more day of sanding ahead of me before I attempt my first application of Rubio Monocoat. Photos coming soon….