DIY Desk Project

DIY Desk Using a Hollow Core Door and Some Cube Storage

Desks for Any Room…

I have wanted new desks for our two boys’ rooms for a LONG time.  I’d been looking for a new project, so a custom DIY Desk Using a Hollow Core Door and Some Cube Storage was it!

They’ve been using these (see below) old beat up desks that I chalk painted when we first moved into the House house.  It was my first experience with chalk paint and I didn’t seal them with enough wax and the paint didn’t hold up and was peeling off.  Also, the drawers were loose and wobbly and well, they were just plain beat up.  We tried to sell them at our yard sale and no one wanted them, then we tried to GIVE THEM AWAY at the yard sale and still no one wanted them.  Then we just left them in our driveway with a FREE sign on them, and still no one took them.  HA!  One of our nice neighbors, who is doing some renovations and has a dumpster in his driveway, helped us disassemble them and put them in his dumpster.  Gotta love good neighbors! Anyway, read on to see the step by step tutorial on how we made the kids new desks.

But first, one more picture. Look how MESSY my oldest son’s desk looks here.  Gah!  He is our disorganized child.  Not a lover of cleaning up his room and putting stuff away.  And he’s always misplacing stuff. Can anyway relate?  My other son’s room is MUCH neater.  But, this was driving me crazy.  Way, way, waaaaay too much clutter.

This post contains some affiliate links for your convenience (which means if you make a purchase after clicking a link I will earn a small commission which helps keep my blog up and running but it won’t cost you a penny more)!

Materials Used – DIY Desk Using a Hollow Door…

Hollow Core Door, I used this one (24″ x 80″) from Home Depot

2 Cube Storage from Target

4 Cube Storage from Target

Peel and Stick White Board Paper

28″ Wooden Table Legs

Bracketts for table legs

2 – 1″ x 4″ x 96″ Boards

Wood Adhesive

Paint (I had leftover white paint in my garage)

MinWax Sealer (I had leftover in my garage)

These DIY desks would be good for ANY room, but we are using them for our boy’s room’s.  Oh and as an added bonus these didn’t end up costing us a lot to make either.

Step 1 in making a DIY Desk Using a Hollow Core Door and Cube Storage, Put Together the Cubes…

Assemble the cubes.  I purchased this 2 cube unit and this 4 cube unit at Target and put them together myself.  It took less than an hour to make all 4 units.

Step 2, Addressing the Height Issue…

The cubes are 14 inches deep and 30 inches high,  and the hollow core door/desk top is 24 inches deep, so we decided we needed some table legs to hold up the back.  They don’t make table legs that are 30 inches high, or at least any that we could find, so we purchased the 28″ size.  Since we needed to add 2 inches in height so the legs would reach the floor, we ended up buying 2,  1″ x 4″ x 96″ boards.  We cut them down to 80″ and then glued them to the door using this wood glue.  See below…Then we put some weights on them and let them dry overnight.  (They did have 36″ table legs that we could have bought and then cut down to 30″, but we choose to do it this way instead.  We thought the extra wood would hold the table leg brackets better, rather than just screwing them into the hollow core door.)

We still needed one more inch to make it 30 inches high, so we cut 4″ x 4″ pieces using the left over wood from the previous step and then glued those to the corners and installed the brackets for the table legs.  We also put some screws in, as you can see below just to reinforce the board.

Step 3, Painting…

Paint the doors and the table legs.  After going back and forth for a while I decided to keep it simple and just paint them white. After I painted, I sealed everything with Minwax Polycrylic Satin Water-based Polyurethane.  I used 3 coats.  Everything dried so fast since I was working in my extremely hot 92 degree garage.

Step 4, Assembly…

Once everything was dried and sealed we brought all the pieces up to the kids rooms to assemble them.  We glued the cubes to the bottom of the doors and then let them dry for about 4 hours.  Then we screwed in the legs and carefully flipped the desks over and placed them where we wanted them.

Step 5, The Finishing Touches…

This was my favorite step!  I found these peel and stick rolls of white board paper on Amazon.   They measure 78.74″ x 17.7″ inch which is a tad smaller than the door/desk top which is 24″ x 80″ which was fine with me.  I carefully stuck them to the top of the desk making sure to get rid of any bubbles, and my son quickly got to work drawing a race track.  He can erase and re-do as he wishes!  Pretty cool huh?  Or, when school starts back up they can use them for solving math problems or whatever homework they are doing.  I had thought about painting the tops with chalk board paint, but then found the white board paper and liked it much better.

Final Product…

And here they are!  All set up in the kids rooms.  The cork boards were a DIY project too.

I ended up buying 4 of these storage cube bins in Navy to organize some of the clutter.  I wonder how long these will stay this organized and clean?  If the picture above is any indication, it won’t last long.  lol!

Total cost per desk was $141.57 (and we used a bunch of Target gift cards so they were less).

I hope you liked this project.  It was pretty simple and my husband and I really like the way they came out, and the kids LOVE them.


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