Building your own furniture is awesome. Even when you download plans from online building websites, though, the work and skills involved in doing a decent job aren’t always within your existing abilities. OpenDesk seeks to make building furniture from existing plans a less-daunting task.
Instead of providing plans that require some actual carpentry work, they offer furniture designs intended to be run through CNC machines. That way, you simply input the cutting parameters on a machine to get your pre-cut wood pieces — no need to come within 6 feet of a circular saw whatsoever. With the individual components cut, just follow the step-by-step assembly instructions and put everything together.
OpenDesk bills itself as a repository of sorts for “open source furniture designs,” which you can freely download and produce as you desire. If you just want one of the furniture pieces without dealing with shopping for materials and visiting a workshop with a CNC machine, you can also order pieces flat-packed from them. Each part will be pre-cut, finished by hand, and shipped to your door, ready for assembly out of the box — just like a piece from IKEA.
As of now, they only offer a limited range of pieces, which include a work desk, a coffee shop table, and a boardroom table, among a few others. Each one is very minimalist, with clean lines and parts that should be easy to assemble without tools as soon as they’re all cut to specifications.
You can check out the designs for yourself directly from the OpenDesk website.