Building a Gaming Desk

Every gaming room should have a great gaming desk so that you can hold all of your dedicated equipment such as monitors, keyboards, mice, speakers, consoles and more. When you purchase a gaming desk, they normally require assembly with instructions that can often be difficult to follow. Alternatively, you may be considering building your very own gaming desk to your own specifications.

Starting from scratch can be a daunting task, since you will likely have no experience in building your own furniture. To help inspire you, we will be putting together some ideas for building your very own gaming desk, exactly to your needs and specifications.

Table of Contents

Feet

We will be starting from the bottom up and where better to start than the feet of the desk? Depending on your material choice for the legs of the chair, you could end up damaging the floor of your room. This could manifest through abrasions to carpets or scratches on hardwood flooring.

These feet are available to purchase in a range of sizes, materials and shapes which will again depend on your choice of legs. If you don’t want to use a premade product, you could always purchase some felt or foam and cut it to size to protect your flooring.

Legs

Now that you have bought or made some feet for your gaming desk, you will need some legs to attach them to. Again you can purchase pre-built gaming desk legs and frames or get creative to create your own. If you opt to use your own materials, many people who build their own gaming desk opt for metal tubing to keep things simple and be structurally sound to hold all of your equipment.

The downside to this will be that unless you are very skilled in construction, the desk will not be adjustable in any way. Be sure to select a desk height of around 28 inches, which should accommodate most users.

Bracing

If you are opting to build your own desk legs, consider making use of diagonal bracing members to prevent your gaming desk from swaying side to side under any pressure, which can even result in the desk breaking.

Desk Top

Now that we have essentially constructed, purchased or assembled the frame we need the most important component for gaming. The desktop surface is where you will place all of your gaming equipment and rest your arms. Again you can either purchase a desk top surface or make your own from a material like wood or laminated MDF.

If you want to get creative, you can even apply custom paint or decal jobs to give the desk a more gaming oriented feel. Obviously the size of the desktop should match the footprint of your frame, but some overhang is a good thing to hide the structural frame elements.

If you are really creative, some people have been very creative to create their own custom gaming desks by repurposing old doors. This will require you to cut the door into the shape you require and apply some finishing so that it is suitable for gaming use. Many gaming desks available for purchase include a carbon fiber finish, which can be difficult to achieve on your own custom build.

You can find adhesive carbon fiber texture sheets that you can apply yourself, but take good care to ensure a smooth surface with no air bubbles. If you do opt to create your own desk top surface rather than pre-purchase one, it will require some hard work and skill to pull off.

Tiered Surface

If you are lacking in space and making a custom gaming desk to fit a smaller room, you may be wanting to optimize your build to make the best use of your limited area. This is where a tiered desk can come in handy, by elevating a secondary surface above the main desk top.

Here, you can place your monitor to free up space on the main desk and give you a better ergonomic design due to the positioning on the screen.

You can do this with a smaller piece of material and some metal or even plastic tubing to elevate the second tier a few inches above the main surface.

Cup Holder

Now that the main build is complete, we can start to consider a few extra additions to give your gaming desk some much needed utility and novelty.

You will want to keep hydrated through longer gaming sessions and to avoid stains or marks on your desk surface, you can buy or create an attachable cup holder that hangs off of the side of your gaming desk. It will be much easier to purchase one of these attachments, since constructing your own clamp will be difficult for people with no engineering ability.

Speaker Holders

Again this addition will help you to save space and make your gaming desk appear more professional. Attachable speaker holders are a great addition to situate your gaming speakers and keep them elevated away from the main desk surface. Again these will be difficult to manufacture yourself so pre purchasing them is the most viable option.

Headset Hook

Setting down your gaming headset on your desk can look messy and leave some cables strewn across your desktop. To keep your new build clear and tidy, an attachable headset hook can be a great solution.

You could feasibly create one yourself but there are many available options that are attached by either a clamp or a magnet. If you opt for the magnet option, ensure that you have a magnetic surface to attach it to and that the magnet is strong enough for your headset of choice.