Well, I am no longer an Ikea virgin. I received the Vika Artur trestles I ordered and spent time Friday putting them together.

Let me first say that they are really nice looking and also that the instructions were nowhere near as confusing as I’ve heard people say. In fact, I would say they were clear as could be. Granted I wasn’t assembling anything really complicated but I laid everything out and took my time and got both put together in less than 45 minutes.

Here are some photos:

After assembling the trestles, I got the old door out of my husband’s shop, where he’d been storing it for me for almost 18 months. It was still covered in a layer of soot from my parents’ kitchen stove and I had been struggling with how to clean the soot off without risking removing the names and dates written on the door next to the height measurements from my parents’ grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

I decided to test clean a spot using regular Dawn dish liquid and water on an old terry washcloth. It worked like a charm: the soot came off and the writing (mostly done with Sharpie markers) was still clear. Here’s a before photo.

And here is a photo of the door after I removed the soot and the metal weather stripping from the edges.

That door is heavy! I wedged a towel under the bottom edge and dragged it through the kitchen and down the hall to my office, propping it against the wall while I moved everything off my old desk and rolled it out of the office. I took out the rug because I just don’t like it, and set up the trestles.

After I set the trestles up in the office, I had to somehow get the door up onto them and I couldn’t tell you now how I managed it without killing or injuring myself. I’m very stiff and sore, though, so my advice for someone else would be to have help!

Here is the desk before I get glass for the top.

I measured and decided to raise the trestles by a couple of inches and since the door is an inch and a half thick, the desk is exactly 32″ above the floor, before the sheet of glass goes on. The reason I decided on a higher desk is because I have a chair that originally went with my drawing table and it goes no lower than 22 inches at the seat. I like it and that’s that.

The edges are very rough so I will have to do a little sanding and get that figured out. The door itself is not as long or as wide as I originally figured so I may have more room to rearrange things than I expected. Either way. I still need to get a filing cabinet before I can get this office back I decent order, but the final reveal, I think, will be a lot of fun!

Meanwhile, the cord situation is going to be resolved–I’ve worked out a plan for that. The last thing I want is to sit facing the door and the first thing anyone sees when they walk in he door is a bunch of power cables and wires hanging off the back of the desk. More on that later.

With the cost of the glass and the cost of the trestles, including shipping, this desk will end up costing me $195 to put together. I might have been able to score cheap sawhorses for the base, but I wanted these trestles because each has a shelf under it. Each trestle is only $30 in the Ikea catalog but because we don’t have an Ikea nearby, I had to order online and shipping was $30. Oh, well.

More to come, so stay tuned.