Sourcing wood for shelf / desk

[paulrockliffe]

Dan_1981 said:

Crikey.

Had a few replies - price seems to be in the region of 170 - 200 quid.

Which seems alot

If you wanted me to come to your house and fit a floating shelf to that exact dimension in solid wood supplied by me, it would be about that. I suspect a professional might be more, but the price is OK for that I'd think.

Maybe that's the right price for a single board over that width, but I doubt that's the best option for you.

For 1" thick ash in 7" boards to cover the area you'd be looking at about £40 with a 2" front lip. The battens to fix and screws would cost next to nothing, you'll need to joint, biscuit and glue the joins as well though.

The problem you have is that other options aren't easy to do economically because other stuff is sold in 8' x 4' sheets. The cheapest option is to laminate some veneered MDF onto 18mm ply to get it properly solid and then add a solid wood lip, but you need to find off-cuts otherwise it's cheaper to do it in solid.

You've got a reasonable chance of finding a suitable piece of solid wood kitchen worktop that's big enough on Gumtree if you're patient, which would probably be the cheapest and easiest way to do this.