mingdao :: mosaic

Wednesday, 15 April 2009

Old desk, new desk

In 2005, I started my first year at UQ and lived in a little rented apartment in Station Road, Indooroopilly. My room came with a queen-sized bed (a very springy one), which was nice, but it meant that there was little floor space. The only way I could fit a desk into my room was if it was no more than 1.1m long.

At IKEA that year, I found the perfect fit - the Mikael workstation.

It fit in the room like a glove. It had a nice amount of file storage space at the top; I could put CDs and my printer on the shelves, and it even had a built-in whiteboard! The only problem was that I had a CRT monitor then (about the size of the one in the picture), and it meant that I had very little actual desk space. It was nearly impossible to do any work on the desk.

A few years later I bought an LCD monitor, which improved things.

I now had some desk space, and so could actually complete uni assignments on time. Mostly.

Then I became a school teacher. Believe it or not, marking large amounts of papers is one of the job descriptions, and I found myself forced to use the dining table, or my desk at work. Claire and I moved house, which afforded us more space for a larger desk, but I could not find anything suitable that wasn't extravagantly priced.

And then came Edison (from Super AMart)!

Edison was shorter than Mikael, but provided more than 3 times as much desk space! And the best thing was, at the time, it was reduced from $299 to $199! I grabbed it as soon as I could, and, after about 6 hours of assembly, it now stands proudly in my (still unpacked) study.

Built-in CD rack, filing cabinet, keyboard drawer, cupboard, plus a huge desk extension...it's almost like having two desks rolled into one! What a beauty. I can enjoy my computer workstation on the right, plus the massive space on the left for marking and writing reports and generally being messy. Mmm. I hope to have this desk for a long long time.

And since I like doing this, here's another desk challenge for you. You'll need to click and enlarge the last picture for this. Can you find on my desk the following: