Today, I want to write about my battlestation. A lot of my hobbies involve my computer and I spend even more time here than ever since WFH was mandated back in March. As with all things, i’m all about the aesthetics so when I moved in with Dustin, and he said that I could use the den as my office, the cogs in my brain started turning. I measured out the space and, to my dismay, every configuration that I came up with was about an inch too long to properly fit. This room is just the right size that any standard desk I was finding either wouldn’t fit or wouldn’t make efficient use of the space. I had decided that I wanted a rounded corner desk for my computer area and that posed yet another obstacle; the specific corner piece (Ikea LINNMON / ADILS Corner Table) that I wanted was no longer sold at Ikea Canada. I scoured Craigslist and Facebook Marketplace every day to no avail until I finally realized that I could just make a “Searching for” post. Within a day, a kind soul responded and sold me the piece I needed for only $20. The next step was to construct the rest of the desk. What I ended up doing was buying a rectangular LINNMON tabletop (also on Craigslist, for only $10) and cutting it into pieces to fill out the rest of the space. The challenge with this was that LINNMON is mostly honeycomb inside, with only solid areas at the parts where the legs get attached. Luckily my dad is a handyman so he helped me hammer some wooden planks into the now-exposed ends to serve as something for the legs to drill into. I already had two 2×2 Ikea Kallax units that I wanted to use as supports for the desk but unfortunately they were the wrong height to work with Ikea’s standard table legs. To solve this, I commissioned someone from Facebook Marketplace to make some metal hairpin legs, painted teal; I am really happy with how they turned out and I think they make my desk even more unique. I also got him to make some little miniature ones which I used to build a riser for the middle monitor.

Remember how I said that I had two 2×2 Kallax units? Well, I was wrong! It turned out that one of them was actually EXPEDIT, which is a little bit taller. It was about an inch or so shorter than the final height of the rest of my desk so I ended up putting it in the corner opposite my computer area to serve as extra table space. The 1″ height difference annoyed me but it was something I could live with…until one day, while wandering the Ikea as-is section, I discovered a shelf on sale for $5 that was the exact dimensions needed to act as a riser. I stuck it under the EXPEDIT unit and now everything sits perfectly flush! The EXPEDIT just feels like an extension of the rest of the desk now.

The area not occupied by my computer is my crafting space. It’s the perfect size for sewing, resin-crafting, or whatever other project I happen to be working on. I picked up a nice desk mat from Ikea to keep it clean and protected.

Once I had the desk in place, the next step was to decorate! I thought about going for the same cozy, airy feel of my last battlestation but decided to opt for something more neon. Cyber Tokyo by Alex Knight was my main inspiration but, being the sugar fanatic that I am, I also wanted to integrate candy somehow. Luckily, I found some neon lights on AliExpress, two of which are popsicle shaped! This was perfect because my mouse is the Mionix Ice Cream and I have the corresponding popsicle-covered deskpad. I also have a pencil case with popsicles on it that I picked up at Daiso during one of my trips to Japan. To go along with the candy theme, my favourite hand cream is the Skin Food Gummy Bear. The packaging is too cute to throw away and I haven’t found a way to refill them so I had just been stashing away my emptys. Since they’re purple, they matched my theme perfectly! I kept teal as a primary colour so I was able to use a bunch of things from my previous set-up. I ordered a bunch of posters from Society6 and put them up on the walls and got some coasters, also from Society6, to keep my desk white. I also picked up some LED light strips on Amazon where I can set the colour from an App on my phone and used those to add pink and blue back-lighting.

Overall, i’m extremely happy with how it all came together!

Now that the space is so cozy and aesthetic, the only issue I was having was the temperature; often it would be so cold that my hands would be too stiff to play games and with the built-in heating, it would usually warm up just about when I was done playing. Dustin solved this issue for me; for Christmas, he bought me a little space heater and did a bunch of research to find an awesome one that perfectly matches my space. It’s amazing; aesthetic, has a remote control, and, most importantly, warms me up super quickly!

P.S. here is what it looked like before

colour changing LED strips

Mionix ice cream, Christmas present from my brother a few years ago

When it was first mandated that we WFH, the company that I work for provided a stipend for all employees to buy some furniture and things to make it more comfortable for us to adjust. I love my job!

amazing heater