Making My Standing Desk

These days I work from home in my very own office, which is a significant upgrade from the Chicago studio apartment Chris and I shared. Now that I have space of my own and work at a job that keeps me at a desk for forty hours a week at a minimum, I figured I’d treat myself to a desk that actually has room for two monitors, a keyboard, a mouse, and a laptop. Shocking I know.

When I was looking around at desk designs, I found out that my Mom needed back surgery. It turns out that her back is acting like it is roughly twenty years older than it should be. The surgery fixed the arthritis (for now), cysts, and pinched nerves but not the general deterioration. Lucky for me, its hereditary. Yay. Basically, I need to maintain a decent level of core strength to help prevent/delay similar deterioration.

I started looking at standing desks because I have much better posture when I stand than when I sit. Also I move around more and forget to take breaks less often. I’m hoping for a reduction in knee pain and back issues, but I haven’t been using it long enough to decide if its helping that stuff yet.

End of story. On to the desk.

Originally I wanted to build it from scratch, but after planning it out, I realized that in order to get what I wanted, I’d have to be much better at carpentry than I actually am. So I moved on to plan B and went to Ikea.

The ODDA chest ended up being exactly the right height and had the drawers and shelves that I needed for storage, so I picked up two of those to use as the supports for the desk top. They also had a solid, unfinished, beech desk top (Vika Byske) that looked like it would hold up to some light abuse.

I opted not to stain the desk top, but I did put a few coats of polyurethane on it so the wood wouldn’t stain or dent as easily. Sticky-backed Velcro is stuck between the chests and the desk top to prevent the top from sliding off the chests and taking my monitors and laptop with it.

Because one of the chests has its drawers under the desk top, I didn’t install the top drawer and just use it as an open shelf. My computer fits into the tall cabinet, so that’s its new home.

I finally have plenty of storage and shelf space in my office and its all organized and setup nicely to get some work done. Let’s see how long I manage to keep it clean.

Update: Standing and working during the day is definitely helping my back. I sat a little too much over the holiday so I had some back pain this morning, but I went back to standing today and it has mostly sorted itself out! Love this desk.