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Weekend Project: Standing Desk

Cover Image for Weekend Project: Standing Desk

One of the good things about working from home is that I have the total control of my works pace. I know that I sit too much, so I decided to build a standing desk for myself.

The Haul

I had a vague idea of what I was looking for and a budget in mind when I drove to IKEA. Some hours later, I was back with my brand new EKBY ALEX, which I decided to mount on the wall with three EKBY HÅLLs I had laying around. I also bought a pair of special door hinges (I couldn't find the proper translation for Aufschraubscharniere mit Feder, so I linked pictures) from a local hardware store to transform one of the EKBY ALEX's drawer into a keyboard tray. And in order to mount the hinges, I bought a piece of wood (54cm long, ~6cm wide & ~1.3cm thick) to reinforce the base of the drawer. I also bought a sheet of white adhesive foil to use it to cover up some pre-drilled holes on EKBY ALEX and 2m of white cable tunnel to manage the cables.

The Montage

Putting together IKEA furnitures is always fun and EKBY ALEX wasn't that difficult. The only tricky part was building the keyboard tray. I left out the front of the drawer during the assembling and screwed it afterwards to the drawer body with the special door hinges. (Be cautions with the door hinges, they snap!). Here are some more detailed pictured of the tray: Standing Desk Keyboard Tray (1. drawer with special hinge; 2. wood reinforcement for the drawer; 3. drawer after applying adhesive foil)

The Result

The whole project took me two days to finish and I'm pretty happy about the result. I'm thinking about buying a smaller keyboard, because the drawer is a bit too small to hold a regular keyboard with a mouse next to it. But right now I'm writing this with my 11" MacBook Air in the tray and it's working totally fine! Standing Desk Result Working in front of a standing desk is something one has to get use to. The first day was very hard for me and I had to go back to my normal desk after ~20 minutes. ^^" But I'm getting better at it.

Here is a infographics with some facts about sitting vs. standing desks. It contains a nice graphic about at which height at a standing desk and the monitor should be. The book beneath my monitor is btw the final book of *The Wheel of Time *by Robert Jordan (completed by Brandon Sanderson): A Memory of Light.

And here is a fun article about standing desks from The New Yorker.

Source of the comic in the title image.