If you’re going to DJ, it’s important to have a space set up at home for practising. Normal desks and tables aren’t much good as they’re too low down to stand up at without ruining your back. You can of course buy a purpose built DJ desk, but they don’t come cheap, can be hard to find and tend to look like rubbish. Lets face it, it’s not like you can buy them at Ikea. Or can you?

Planning and building your own DJ desk is surprisingly easy, with the added bonus of being customisable to your specific needs. It also means you can make something that looks stylish and fits in with your home furnishings.

The common solution is to use a good old Ikea ‘EXPEDIT’ shelving unit (now called KALLAX), turned on it’s side. This is usually propped up on something or given legs to provide a little extra hight. Borrowing inspiration and designs from around the Web, I took mine a step further and added a few extras. There’s some great info about this kind of design in this post, over at DJ Tech Tools and also Ikea Hackers.

Here’s a breakdown of how I built it. Sorry for the potato quality images.

First off I mounted 6 legs on the bottom of the Expedit. The legs I used are called STUBBARP and are part of the BESTÅ system.

I Marked out where to drill the holes using a pencil, put through the middle of the legs. The outside panels of the Expedit are hollow, apart from the corners, so I did my best to line the feet up with them. For the middle feet I lined them up with the particle board shelves.

The dimensions of the surface on top were a little small so I added a LINNMON table top to give me a little more space. I used metal plaster board bolts in the table top, as it’s hollow inside an I dont think a regular screw would do the job. Even better would have been the snap open ‘butterfly’ type, but I didn’t know they existed at the time! Some strong wood glue or liquid nails would be ideal, but i wanted to be able to flat pack it again if need be. I Also used little pieces of rubber inner tube from a bike as spacers between the table top and the Expedit.

Almost done! As you can see in these pics, I left out one of the middle panels of the Expedit to make room for an amplifier.

I wanted to have a stand for my laptop and an external monitor, and wanted them to be easily adjustable. Fortunately someone was selling gas lift arms on eBay very cheaply. I added a couple of these on along with a butchered BRÄDA laptop holder from Ikea (which I actually found in a charity shop for $2!).

Once I got all my gear in place, it looked pretty awesome, but one thing was clear; I needed to work on the cable management!

First I put in four cable holes with grommets. Then I got some cable tape (It’s like velcro and only sticks to itself), and screwed in sections where it was needed.

Here’s the DIY IKEA DJ desk ready to play with!

Have you made your own DJ desk? Got any suggestions for improvements? Let’s hear about it in the comments!