DIY Toddler Ikea TROFAST Desk

did you see what daddy made for [Music] you I like this cre I got what about the thing I made for you oh I forgot her bed you go look at your new desk look you can put all your things in there what's up guys I'm Zach and welcome back to Workshop edits and in today's episode of my daughter does not care what I just built her we are going to be building this trof fault style desk that has become very popular from Ikea it utilizes a repeating pattern within the legs with some D grooves or railings and these bins from Ikea that will slide in and out that you can really customize as much or as little as you want to fit the space I hope you guys enjoy this video let's go ahead and get started all right so I'm in the shop and I just want to talk to you through a little bit what I'm going to be doing so the way that I've seen these desks done before is with some nice furniture grade plywood which by the way is insanely expensive these days I bought two sheets of furniture grade Plywood And they were $89.99 each plus tax so this overall desk when you factor in two sheets of plywood pocket hole screws glue finish the drawers like $350 all in so take that into account however it's a cool project cuz they're incredibly customizable like you can build them as big and wide as you want based on like the number of sheets of plywood you want to buy you can make them as tall as you want there's actually a really good chart out there for like the height of a sitting desk based on your toddler's age or your size so I factored that in in My overall design the overall like cut list and everything is actually relatively straightforward it's just like maneuvering big sheets of plywood so I've got my sheets of plywood I'm going to make all of my cuts here the goal for this first round is cut the big piece on top which I think the final Dimension I ended up with was around 91 in and then the overall height of the desk factoring in a top that is 3/4 in and then the height of the support it's going to be I think those pieces are like a little over 19 inches tall so that the desk itself is roughly 20 in tall the cool thing about these is you can really make them as tall as you want and you can also add supports later on as your child gets bigger and you want to raise this thing up or you want to turn it into a standing Des like there super modifiable um I'm just making mine the size of a on the smaller side three-year-old but again room for expansion and you can change the amount of drawers that you have like they're just they're super cool they again like it's a little bit pricey but I don't know for a custom desk like $350 she's going to have it forever for as long as she wants in this room I think it's kind of an awesome project so I hope you guys can find just like a little bit of inspiration like see how I did and the project itself is cool so what I want to do like I said is cut the top down and I want to cut all of the vertical pieces get the Doos cut on those and get those pieces glued together so that then tomorrow I can just assemble the whole desk and then add support pieces at the bottom so let's start breaking down all of our material cutting full sheets of plywood in 100 degree heat is no joke [Music] just finished breaking down all of the legs the nice thing about this is that it it's modular so what I'm going to do next is Mark out where I'm going to cut my Doos each one is going to get four Doos now in my design some of the sections have larger bins but what I'm going to do is just cut the Dos in case I ever want to swap those out for for a bunch of smaller bins and it it just makes it easier and I'm not going to be able to do it after the fact and I figured why not so going to use one piece Mark out where I think I want all the DS use a test bin which I have right here and I'm waiting for the rest to come in the mail and then go from there the whole point is to cut slightly larger than half inch grooves because the grooves on these if you can see them are half inch and these will just slide in and out nicely uh without a whole lot of friction but will also be held in there tightly am I the only one who always ends up almost slicing their entire hand off when trying to change their saw blade [Music] it's crazy how different these sizes are for the D stack on a saw stop I'm going to put DS that are half inch that should give it just enough play but keep it in there nice and secure got the DAT Blade Set up got all my pieces cut did a test cut just to make sure that the drawer slide fits it fits just with enough wiggle room for it to slide slide nicely but it's not going to be able to like wiggle itself out especially with a three-year-old pulling these bins in and out most important thing with doing this again all of these are going to be the exact same and I marked out what I'm just calling like my story piece which has exactly where all of my cuts are going to go is to just keep the orientation of all of these in the same direction because one length is 19 and 3/4 and one is 19 and a/4 so there's a/ inch difference so I do have them all stacked up like they should be I'm just going to do all of one cut at a time and then repeat that so I've got 40 of these to cut so taking it slow going to be using my gripper Doos are no joke cutting wide pieces is is kind of no joke and I have had Kickbacks before so time just take your time on these [Music] all 40 datos are cut did that very slow felt safe doing it but I'm just going to recommend again like Doos are no joke and if you haven't done them before just take your time I went ahead and sorted the pieces again like you're never going to see the back of the desk so I just found the fronts that I like the best because there is a little bit of like no math that is going to going to go into this because I need three sections that are glued together in mirrors of each other because they're going to be in the middle and housing drawers so I picked those six and then the rest are going to be just individual pieces that I don't have to touch until I assemble this thing so the last thing I want to do before tomorrow is get those three sections glued up and I'm just going to spread glue do it on top of my table saw which I know is super flat and then put something super heavy to sandwich all all of them together then I'll know that they're nice and straight and I'll keep them lined up too because all the D are exactly where they need to be so if I keep them lined up everything should be good when I go to drill pocket holes and start assembling this thing all right day two got the pieces right there we're going to cut some pocket holes so I ran into a problem I've never run into before which is because I cut the Doos there's actually not a lot of material for these pocket hole screws to grip onto and normally when you do 3/4 inch material you use inch and a quar pocket hole screws but I have to use 34 in or 1 in screws at this point so I don't think it's a huge deal but I think what it means is I'm going to actually glue these in place and then I'm just going to add more reinforcement like lateral reinforcement for it than I maybe originally was going to but weird problem I think it's going to be fine so the construction of this is relatively straightforward so I've got my D pieces and I did Mark out or I can be picky with what the front or back is but going be very simple these will get each of these pieces will get mounted like this this obviously this is upside down and I'm also going to mount these so that they are recessed uh half an inch drawers are going to fit in to the grooves just like that and then another piece will go here so what I need to do is take all of my pieces starting on this end and I'm going to mark all the way across this isn't cut to length so it'll get cut to length at the end I think 91 or 92 in is the final width of it because that's how wide this base again you can make it as big as you want so what I just want to make sure I do is I take into account how wide these are so that these Doos are just slightly wider you know the inside of the does are slightly wider at each step that way there's just a little bit of plague here but these can slide in out nicely without them popping out cuz kids are crazy so let's do all that marking start on this side actually I'm changing my mind I'm going to do these one at a time and then just progress over versus trying to pre-mark everything out [Laughter] [Music] all right so I got the first one in place this is not very stable just because of that Groove but I wanted to make sure that it was lined up and it didn't go through the plywood so it's it's in there now so I'm going to take now one of my middle divider pieces that'll just stand up perfect take my bin slide it in just going to mark this piece right here so remove this remove the bin real quick this was my marking right here take my tape measure put it up against there and I can see that that is 11 and 116th so with that measurement now I can just go piece by piece use 11 and 11/6 as my spacing in between and I'll know that because all my D are the same depth and all the bins are the same width that everything should line up perfectly easy I've got all of the legs installed they are real flimsy actually here they're pretty flimsy so what I'm going to do is originally I was just going to put like little kind of stretchers here just to keep everything even instead what I'm going to do is cuz I have quite a bit of extra material is I'm going to cut some big spacers that are going to go maybe like half or whatever the width is of the material I have and just like put like a square blocking in here and use pocket holes to pull everything together and that should add like shearing strength to it and I might even cut a smaller one and do it at the front base of it we'll see but I think that'll Shore everything up [Music] it's all right this is much more secure so the last thing I'm going to do is trim this to length now this corner is going to go into the corner of the room and there's some baseboard there so this is kind of perfect so I'm going to use blue tape uh the furniture grade plywood like Maple plywood or Oak plywood that has this really thin veneer is really hard to work with with I'm just going to go and say that like a thin veneer lot of chip out unless you have total zero clearance inserts on like everything you're going to get some chip outs so that's that's made it hard to like actually work with but I think all the areas that are going to be like accessible by like my daughter's little hands I think it's going to be fine so the corner I mentioned there's baseboards there so I'm actually just going to trim this a little bit long so this can go all the way up to that corner so just be a little bit of overhang and it's perfect because I can just use this as my straight edge I'll have to cut this way and use just whatever this width is for my saw which I think is just a little under an inch but I'm just using blue tape here to try to minimize the chip out on this cut because I'm also cutting upside down here it should pull the wood in on this side so I think this should you know it's the chip out's mostly for here but I'm going to do the blue tape on both sides just to try to make this cut as clean as possible didn't think about this shoot I think I have to take the blade guard off which I would not recommend doing this is the only time I've ever removed a blade guard I hate it be careful very clean [Music] [Music] last thing I'm going to do before I put a finish on this and just do like the touch-ups of sanding is before I flip it over I'm just going to put on some like foam paddings underneath it just so it doesn't scratch the flooring if it gets shifted around all right everything sanded down I ended up sanding all of the after I rolled the edges I sanded them to 320 so they're pretty smooth um you I feel good about like running my hand along these edges and everything Feels kidfriendly So for finish I'm using this finish that I got a long time ago I think it's Swedish it's like clear it rolls on or kind of like um you can spread it on but it dries really quickly it dries really smooth too so you don't actually have to sand it so I'm going to do the entire top the sides and this front face I'm not going to worry about anything else oh actually I'm going to do just the insides here just to sort of protected because this section is where my daughter will eventually be sitting and doing arts and crafts and our dirty little feet kick in the wall so I'm actually just going to pop this open and dump the Finish onto here and then use a combin of a card scraper and then this small paintbrush just to roll it in [Music] all right so that is going to wrap it up for this video now i' said this a lot in the video but the reality is you can customize these desks as much as you want you can make them bigger you can make them taller you can change the variations of the types of Doos that you have to fit more or less storage or make it more customizable you can paint it you can add color to it I think those are definitely things that we might add to this later once this room is fully set up but for now I think just the minimalistic wood plus the drawers bin is the right look for this space you can also get very customizable with the types of things that you put on the wall up here in terms of paper rollers or extra storage for arts and crafts like it's really a great simple but incredibly versatile and customizable project and awesome for a toddler's room who have lots of toys that are often spread out throughout the house and take over your space and overall like really happy with this project it was a very simple weekend build there's lots of different ways to do it if you don't have the tools that I have so overall I hope you guys enjoyed this if you enjoyed it would love it if you would just like the video share it with somebody maybe subscribe to the channel for the next video and I'll see you guys next time on whatever it is that I'm building bye