Hello Everyone,

This is my first Instructable, although I have been reading for months I finally decided to contribute! I needed a desk for an unused corner of my living room. I began to look on craigslist for desks, various shopping websites and couldn't find anything I liked so, I decided to try my hand at building a desk. For this project i decided to go as cheap as possible seeing as I am still a novice in carpentry and frankly do not have a lot of money to spend on a desk for a basement room.

Throughout this Instrucable I will be keeping a total of money spent on the project. Lets get to work.

Step 1: Desk Top.

I found a man selling desktops on craigslist for $5 a piece. This fit right into my budget so I bought two.

I got the tops home and began to plan the dimensions for the desk.

Project total= $10

Step 2: Measure, Measure, Cut!

I decided the desk legs would be 30" in height, needed to be 22" in depth and 48" wide. Keeping with the theme "cheap as possible" I looked around the garage and found enough scrap 2x4's that I only needed to buy three 96" 2x4's from the hardware store. The stained pieces you see are from the scraps I found, unstained pieces are the new.

Project total= $19

Step 3: Assembly.

I brought in the cut pieces from the garage to the basement, a decision made out of laziness as I did not want to carry in a completed desk.I used wood glue and 3" screws (both of which I had in the garage) to assemble to legs, once that was done I laid the top of the desk top down and began to assemble directly on the top. I built one desk from the bottom to the top putting the top on last but just wanted to shake things up on the second desk.

To attach the top to the legs I used corner braces two on each side then put the cross bars on the back for stability.

Project total= $26

Step 4: Flip It Over and Done!

Once the top was connected all that was left was to flip it over and enjoy. I added a small shelf on the bottom out of some scrap plywood I had found and within minutes I had it filled with junk and clutter!

Now I know this is not the prettiest desk you will find here, but it does fit in my "cheap as possible" theme and it is functional. I live my life by function over form. I do plan on staining the rest of the desk sometime in the future but for now, I have a desk. Hopefully you enjoyed this project, it was a quick build taking maybe two hours of total work and I defiantly learned a lot about woodworking.