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Hi Everyone
This is my first post. I am in the middle of a whole house renovation. It’s going well but as many of you would know the funds tend to evaporate before your eyes. I am building a study (man cave) at the front of the house for me to have my Mac and photography equipment setup. Unfortunately the budget wont allow for custom cabinetry so I am going to need to be innovate and hack some off the shelf items. I am fairly handy and have lots of tools so should be ok. The room is approximately 3m x 2.4m. One of the main features I am looking to make it a long desk the whole length of the room and a return. If anyone has done something similar before would love to see your project. I am going to need to source a 3 metre length of timber or laminate for the desktop. I would like it to have the appearance that its floating with minimal legs / supports visible. I will also need to join the 2 pieces of desktop. I am thinking dowell joints maybe but would need a jig to get the holes to line up. As the room is narrow the desk would probably be no more than 5-600mm wide. Behind the desk I am thinking wall mounted bookcases. Surprisingly these have been hard to find. The best I can see at the moment is the Eket range from Ikea which are not quite ideal as I was more after a traditional looking bookcase than cubes. I guess the other option could be to buy sheets of laminate and build them. It seems hard to source MDF in anything other than white. I am getting multiple GPOs and data point in the room so everything is networked. The floor will be blond southern beech timber. Any help with design or tips on construction would be much appreciated.
@JS001 wrote:Perhaps a combination of the ledger and some concealed brackets might work nicely. I dont plant on having too much weight. An IMac, scanner, printer although I would always over engineer to a point that you could place some heavy items on the desk or someone decides to sit on it. I have 3 kids so the possibilities are endless
Top stuff @JS001 mate; I love the way you are thinking in terms of 'real world situations' (might have three kids on it sort of thing). It is a great approach to ensuring that it is structurally sound *thumbsup* My apologies if my first response sounded a little like '1+1=2' as well; I certainly did not want to sound patronising! It is tough to tell from a single post how much experience people have with deisgning and constructing things...my apologies for that. You obviously have an idea what you are doing so rock and roll 
Definitely a combination of the brackets and ledgers would be more than suitable...I really don't want to chase into my walls for my recess area drawers so I am thinking of trying to use some 'Equal Angle' or something else...however I don't know if it will help at all but this is a link to the Bunnings backyard that had the floating seating that spanned a healthy distance:
I cannot see a time on the video; however it is about a third the way through, in a 'time lapse' sequence, straight after the pizza oven. I seem to remember that there was a sequence of pictures related to this 'makeover' that showed a close up of the seating...I cannot find it sorry! From pausing at the right time (blink and you'll miss it!) it looks like a combination of some Square Hollow Section metal with some standard timber joists; all joined to a rear timber ledger...or the SHS may be continuing through into the wall...I cannot see.
Yes...I really don't know if that will help much and I apologise for the vagueness. Just trying to help if I can!
Cheers mate
