A few years ago I moved to Cambridge. This meant finding a place to rent. The house we moved into had recently been refurbished, which was a nice bonus for a rented property. Unfortunately this meant the landlords were quite protective of the property and it would be hard to get away with drilling any holes in the walls without it being noticed.
To get around this I designed and built two ‘desk hoods’. Their initial purpose was to provide two long shelves against the wall without having to attach brackets. This worked well and as the design evolved I added a backboard which opened up more storage and mounting possibilities.
As you can see the desk has really become a workbench with a mounted screen and hooks for tools. The wooden frame is built from 2.5 cm^2 pieces of oak and is joined using 3D printed brackets, these worked well and the frame is very sturdy in all directions.
The second desk hood is pretty much the same design with a few differences and improvements.
This one has a pegboard backboard. To buy pegboard, it turns out, is quite expensive. So instead we drilled 1056 holes into a sheet of plywood over a series of days, using a template to get the spacing correct. The result was almost worth it.
Another desk modification that doesn’t really warrant it’s own project page is a wire storage box which is mounted under the desk.
I would highly recommend this modification to anyone with a desk and lots of wires underneath it. All you really need to do is hinge some sort of box, or even piece of wood, to the underside of the desk and find a way to latch it. Clearing the wires from the floor is very satisfying.
