Caroline Collective

Before opening last year we spent awhile shopping around for a table solution for our dedicated members. While IKEA offers a larger version of the table that most other coworking spaces in the nation use as their dedicated desk, we knew that our budget couldn’t support purchasing a complement of those tables. Additionally, being in Texas meant that whatever dedicated desk we offered needed to fit the stereotype of everything being bigger. We also knew that being enterprising engineers and architects we could build something that would work well and look like good design.

We were half correct.

Billed as the Presston (plans available here), these tables were designed by our friend Presston, a set designer for the Houston Museum of Natural Sciences. These tables are less expensive than the IKEA solution, almost twice the size by square foot and have a pleasant visual contrast between the black stained top and the natural wood legs. Initially, everyone was quite satisfied with the size and the space of the tables. As the year wore on a couple of them began to wobble a little bit as everyone’s elbows rocked back and forth in coworking delight and for most events we reconfigured the space to fit the needs. Suffice to say, these tables got a lot of mileage over the course of the year.

Ultimately, we needed to replace the legs with something that didn’t wobble. We looked into reinforcing the wood, we looked into cutting plywood outlines to add more rigidity and prevent a moment arm. We even looked into replacing the legs with uber-chic pipe fixtures. None of these solutions were either cost or time effective. Which brought us back to the IKEA legs that work so well for many other tables they sell. After some clever tinkering from Ned we found that a small strip of plywood on the back of the hollow core doors provided enough structure to secure the legs. Voila, we’ve got legs that no longer wobble, rotate or quiver in a strong breeze. And with half our solution provided by IKEA and the other half a hollow core door, we’ve still got larger tables for a lower price.