Chrispy_ wrote:The finishing I am talking about would require a bit of ventilated workspace, but even if you were to buy new powertools for the job, then dispose of them, you'd still have a lot of spare change from $2000.
Maybe it's a geography problem but in the UK that sort of furniture is commonplace for around £200 and you can get significantly nicer stuff for similar money if you do a little hunting.
Hell, for £300 here you can get a solid oak 6-seater dining table...
Office furniture is definitely a profitable industry, but again, that $2k price included cross-country shipping for a double-laminated desk assembly that is just shy of eight feet long, and presumably made of plywood just so anybody of normal stature has a fighting chance of lifting the shipping box. Since you're in Western Europe, bear in mind that "cross country" looks like this: the distance from New York City to Los Angeles is roughly the same as the distance from Lisbon to Moscow.
The table in your link would cost about USD $500 at current conversion rates and appears to be made from relatively low-grade oak offcuts, compression glued back together into a butcher-block style slab. As it happens, my folks saved up for years to be able to afford a high-quality, continuous-surface oak diningroom set nearly twice as large as that, and the price was well north of what that there is selling for.
I'm an occasional woodworker myself, and the grandson of a (now-retired) custom cabinetmaker who did all of his business by word-of-mouth, so I do have a deep appreciation for good craftsmanship over commercial mass production. However, it takes time and experience to get a consistently good finish, especially over a broad flat area like a desk surface, and I have an appreciation for
that, too. Anyone who takes up the hobby for a one-off application of this scale, especially without an experienced craftsman to offer some guidance, is probably going to be disappointed with the results.