Right now until I move out of this godforsaken apartment
What I will be getting out of storage
As far as desks go it’s fairly cheap (it is an IKEA brand desk) but I just really like all the different shelves. It also had cup holders which I laughed at when I first got it but it snugly fits my water bottle so my cat almost never knocks it off.
If I had an unlimited budget I would definitely want an L shaped desk of some kind. There’s a company in Texas called Uplift that makes some really nice height adjusting ones. Plus having moved around a bit having a desk that comes apart and puts together easily is really nice to have. Helping my father move his old hulking desk into their new place was a nightmare.
For other things like video game boxes I would personally consider a bookshelf just because it frees up more space on your desk. Plus I just kind of like standing in front of bookshelves looking at stuff.
Echoing @BluShine about the custom built ones. My grandfather was a woodworker and loved building furniture for people in his town.
Besides a custom solution, which is super cool but maybe expensive, I’d like to make the case for a simple, plain desk with two drawers: they’re very flexible. Need some extra storage? Add a small, rollable hutch underneath and some shelving above it. Or a tall cabinet or shelves on the side. Get them in matching materials or colours (if possible from the same manufacturer and series) and it’ll fit together nicely. A simple desk can be made to fit most of your needs as you move on in life, and if it’s in plain wood you can easily refurbish and repaint it whenever the mood hits.
Of course, if you do have more specialized needs it won’t cover them, so it all depends on what you want out of it
(Attached is mine, I’m eyeing a nice sideboard to put my Switch on)
I’m using a ‘Tokyo’ desk from Structube, and love it. I wanted a really big desk so I could fit a couple of monitors and still have space left over; this one’s 71". I like having shelves for the consoles instead of having them on the desk (ran out of space before I got the Wii U, so on the desk it went). The desk is also tall enough to fit a full tower (Corsair 750D) under it with 0 issues for clearance.
I had a glass top desk before that was about a foot shorter, and hated it. Not really because of the size, but because there is never a time when a glass desk doesn’t look dusty or smudged.
Debated uploading this because the cables are a mess right now, but such is life.
I’ve got a decent one from Jysk (aka Danish IKEA with more locations and smaller stores). Since I do a wide mix of stuff, it suits me well - here’s a photo from right after I got the new ROG laptop, with my old Lenovo ultrabook (which physically doesn’t close properly anymore) beside it.
Mine is very definitely a college apartment desk. Weeb crap, MtG cards from drafts and deck techs, Crown bag full of dice, and 5e handbooks on top of the tower. Oh, and the chili pepper lights, can’t forget those tacky wonders. They’re relics from when I lived in Louisiana as a child, and are almost as old as me.
I wanted a standing desk. I was converted by an article in PC gamer about the benefits. I do have a chair I sit in sometimes when I just want to chill. Perhaps a bit too high up for mouse and keyboard, but I’m a controller kind of guy anyway. Proper adjustable standing desks are too expensive. So I went to ikea brought the table top (1.6m wide) and four adjustable legs. Extended the legs as far as they go. This gave me enough space down below for a £15 coffee table (also IKEA) upon which I could sit my tower, subwoofer and consoles. It’s a little wobbly but it’s been standing now for over a year.
Once I get my own place I’m go proper DIY on my setup. I’ve been inspired by these kinds of setups.
So are you trying to find a desk on which you can put your PC setup AND your games consoles? Would the consoles use the same television/monitor as your PC? What are you trying to do exactly?
I’ll be buying a desk soon, but I’m going to be very boring and get an IKEA Linnmon, which is the same as the shitty wobbly thing I had in the flat I was previously renting, but I’m hoping this one will be a little nicer because:
It won’t be that super budget-looking white finish.
I’ll be using drawers as the side supports, which will hopefully mean it’ll be a bit more stable. Also, I don’t think anyone ever retightened the screws for the legs on my old one, which apparently you’re meant to periodically do.
It will be 2 m wide, the idea being that I’ll have one side as my computer space and the other side as doing-other-stuff-without-piling-the-keyboard-on-top-of-my-other-desk-junk space. Unfortunately they don’t seem to do desks that wide at 75 cm depth, which is what my old one was, but I reckon the greater width is more valuable than the 15 cm I lose between me and my monitors.
I will mount one or two of those cable tray things to the bottom and do my darnedest to keep everything except the tower off the floor (including the power strip). I know from experience that computer mess is a surefire way to put me off ever bothering to hoover under there, so it gets really dusty and awful. I got literally a hundred velcro cable ties for about £2; I’ll probably get some of those little things that you stick on stuff and put cable ties through, though I’m hoping I can find some large enough to fit velcro straps because having to snip a bunch of cable ties to change one wire is the absolute worst.
So anyway, my future desk is objectively incredibly boring and unsexy, but I’m hoping it will be functional for me and I’m actually pretty excited about it. But before buying any furniture I want to redecorate a bit, and particularly that room, which might actually take me forever, so this is all just hypothetical.
It’s probably easy to overstate that kind of effect, but when bits of paper would start to mount up on my desk I found myself unable to face dealing with even simple stuff I got in the post. That’s probably evidence of larger personal problems of mine, and even dealing with it on a superficial level probably has more to it than “nice desk now” (I’m planning to get a bunch of ring binders and have a Proper Place for them and Keep Things In Order), but im sure there’s something to be said for nice surroundings putting you in the right state of mind. It’s probably less that nice furniture supercharges you, and more like crappy furniture stresses you and drains your mental energy. At least, that’s how it seems to me.
But I’ve never been productive, so you shouldn’t listen to me.
It does for me. I am easily distracted, so cleaning up and having everything in its right place both relaxes me and makes it easier for me to stay focused. It’s also important that the desk is stable. If it wobbles, that drives me nuts, and I just fixate on not having it react to my every move, eventually giving in to temptation and focusing on fixing the wobble.
I have a super normal desk - an older model of the Ikea Bekant - and am generally happy with it. For anyone looking for a new desk, make sure it isn’t just a plank of MDF with four legs screwed into it. I’d recommend a desk that has a frame, to prevent wobbling, and to limit the points at which you’d need to adjust it if it becomes unstable.
My life got so much more convenient after getting a cheap no brand HDMI switcher. There used to be other consoles on here, but i moved them to the TV. Monitor is resting on the Complete Works of William Shakespeare.
SO, originally the plan was for the PC, Switch and PS4 to be all plugged into the same display, so I could toss my really bad TV set up, and not worry about anything. Since then, I’ve parted ways with my PS4 (and the whole one game I played with it), and I’ve decided to keep things small and easy to move, since I do that a lot.
I’m probably going to keep my TV and the Switch/NES Classic set up, mostly because finding an HDMI switch with an Audio Extractor is hard and expensive. So at this point, I’m looking at a) An IKEA ALEX, because I’m in love with that cable management (but I sat at one yesterday and it felt really short? I dunno) or b) some kind of LINMMON combination where I drill a hole and install a basic grommet for cords.
Some nice setups here. I really wish I had a desk, and a good chair. And a desktop computer… I always sit at my kitchen table to do my things, and it doesn’t have quite the correct energy. And no possibility to swivel.
