Ikea Hack Standing Desk
Right, lets get one thing straight - I always thought this whole standing desk thing was dotcom valley hipster bullshit. Standing up to work? utter bollocks!
Now that’s out of the way I’ll tell you about one morning last August when I fell asleep in an awkward position and woke up to a huge amount of pain in my neck, over the next few days it got worse until I couldn’t sleep and needed to see a chiropractor and a doctor for some prescription pain killers and muscle relaxants just to sleep at night. During the day I couldn’t comfortably sit at my desk and in the Simwood office we had a few workbenches at the back of the room so I started standing at them with my laptop.
After a week or so my neck was fine but I remained at the standing desk and never really missed sitting down during the working day.
Fast forward to January and in preparation for leaving Simwood I found myself working in my home office which was very much a sit-down desk, after a morning of sitting in what once felt to me like a very comfortable Aeron chair I found the whole thing to be very discomforting and even unnatural.
I realised I missed standing up!
I looked at standing desk solutions and found them all to be a bit on the pricey side, especially since I knew I didn’t want one with adjustable height - I wanted to set it up and leave it. The standing desks at Simwood are just a couple of Ikea tables and some tall legs that I cobbled together when I set up the office (with the tabletops bolted to the wall for stability) so I wondered if the same would work for my home office - I looked at the Ikea Hackers website for some inspiration but the standing desks there are largely around space-saving or adapting a sitting desk.
Eventually I stumbled across this hack for a kitchen island using a Kallax shelving unit, some small cabinet legs, a tabletop and the same table legs I used for the standing desks at Simwood.
It didn’t take much to adapt it for my requirements, I swapped out the smaller Capita legs for Metod supporting legs which raise the Kallax up a bit higher and make the whole desk taller and I swapped the cheap Linnmon table top for a higher quality (and larger) Tornliden tabletop... and that was it. In total I spent £162 on parts to build the desk.
Here are some shots of putting it together:
I used the wall brackets that were supplied with the table legs to attach the tabletop to the Kallax and the rear and the front.
It soon became clear that working on a hard wood floor was different from working in the office on a carpeted floor so I invested in a Stanley Utility Mat which I was somewhat wary of but has turned out to be a great investment and makes a big difference to comfort, especially when barefoot. I also added some Ikea Dioder lights to add some underlighting to the desk and backlighting to the monitors.
I’ve been using this new setup for most of January now and I’m really happy with it, I still need to find a nicer way of raising my Apple monitors as they are currently perched on top of iPhone boxes but I’m sure I’ll find something soon.