Office Cube Panels -- Part 1

Our business is moving offices. In our current space, everyone has an office. In our new one, we have some offices and a few large rooms where several people will have to share the space. We looked at cube walls...expensive at $1000 or more per cube, even for used. And you better like grey, sea foam, or mauve fabric walls...YUK! So I've decided to build some self-supporting panel walls that will create three 8' x 10' offices. At that size, they will accommodate our current furniture. Plus, and more importantly, we can customize, choose the surface, etc. Anyway, I built some test panels and we've decided to go with simple clear-coated pine and birch for a clean, natural design. My hope is that I will be able to create three offices for less than $700.

So here's the plan. Each panel will be made of a simple rectangular frame of 1" x 3" select pine. Each panel will be 4' wide by 6' high. The frames will be filled with 1/4" cabinet grade plywood. Each cube will then be constructed with 4 panels to make 2 walls. I'll use a simple T design so that the structure will be self supporting (we'll use windows and the building walls as the other 2 walls). I'm sure I'll have to also create some small 1' wide panels for some added support, but this should all work.

I started by cutting all the pine I needed for the frames. I rabbited the edges to accept the 1/4" ply and I rabbited the ends of the vertical sides to accept the horizontal tops and bottoms. Next step assemble the frames and start fitting the panels in. There are quite a few more details involved...connections, inner supports, etc...that I will share in future posts. But we are off and running. I searched and searched online for projects like this and couldn't find any. There were some that were just cheap, slapped up temporary walls, but nothing that looked good and was economical. If anyone out there has done something like this or seen something like this online, I'd love to know about it. Stay tuned, more to come.