What do you do after knocking a wall down at the office?
Build your own desks of course
Work can be boring, mundane and full of tasks to do, emails to send and meetings you would rather not go to. Things can be different.
We try to push that out the door here at Red Bullet.
Of course we work hard for our clients and their customers, but ultimately if you can’t go home from where you spend most of your day 5 days a week feeling inspired at the end of each day & excited to come in tomorrow, something needs to shift in your company culture.
For some time, we’ve started to explore how we can connect the things we love to do outside work make a crossover into our working life.
I love good coffee — we have a nespresso machine… its the little things.
Lots of us like running and cycling outside of work — so we installed a shower to allow people to cycle to work and go out for a midday run and not be a sweaty mess for that client sprint workshop later…
Finding space in your culture to engage your team’s interests and needs in their own lives builds a platform for personal growth and connection to the company vision.
After a big leak in the studio resulting in repair work back in the spring of ’17, we decided to knock a wall down to create a space in our building big enough for us all to work in one space together.
However this created a problem. We had no desk big enough and the individual ones we did have were far too big to place next to each other in the new space.
We looked online and found a few options, but still noting that quite hit the button and gave us the space and size we needed.
“Lets build our own desks!” someone suggested.
“why not” we all said
We needed new desks.
Nick loves furniture design.
Gareth has done up his house, so has some man-tools.
I’ve got some sandpaper…
(invite the things people like in personal life to come into work life…)
We got out a measuring tape and planned it all out in the new massive space we’d created.
I bought some old scaffold boards and ordered some sexy looking legs from ebay. We set a hack day date of the following Friday.
Planking
We knew what we wanted to have as an outcome, and we’d designed the end result in our little brains and with the measurements on hand we got to work cutting 14 lengths from the scaffold boards all the same size for 2 large desks.
We then cut 4 shorter lengths for weight bearers that would also act as the frames for the legs to go into later.
Each board was riddled with rusty iron nails so spent time carefully picking out the tetanus spikes and then laid the boards out for deciding what side to have as top and bottom.
Smooth operator
Once we’d figured out what board was best where, we screwed the shorter boards to the underside and created the large table (x2).
We then headed to the garden to make the most outrageous noise with an electric planer, much to the delight of our neighbours. (Its ok, we bought them a nice bottle or two later on). Honestly, it was insanely loud.
After several hours of racket that could be heard 8 roads away (!) we finally finished the planing. We sanded them all down with coarse then finer paper and got them ready for a clean before taking them inside to the new space for coating in danish oil.
3 coats over 48 hours later and our desks were ready for use.
We love our desks. More probably because we couldn’t find anything for sale anywhere like what we wanted or needed, and even more so as we built these beauties ourselves.
If you’re looking for new desks for your office and like what we did here, please don’t contact us.
If however you’re looking for digital, creative design/development, or comms consultancy, we’d love to hear from you — and are more than happy to have you pop in for a coffee and a look at our desks :)
Red Bullet are a creative agency based in the heart of Canterbury, Kent serving some of the countries most forward thinking brands, organisations and companies with clever and intuitive design and development.
