A Beautiful Stand Up Desk

I have been experimenting with stand-up desks for a while, but most were just simple stand up desk laptop risers built out anything I could find.

For example I have "borrowed" a piano chair.

This sort of technique can transform almost any desk into a reasonably good stand up desk as long as the piano chair owner does not complain too much ;)

This worked for me for quite a while, but lately I have been experiencing discomfort as looking down onto the small laptop screen for extended periods of time is no fun. I have looked at many alternatives, some of which were:

• kangaroo elite
• Ikea Standing desk for 22 dollars
• staandupdesk.com

None quite resonated with me. I wanted:

• reasonably cheap solution
• easily being able to switch from standing to sitting and vice versa
• accommodate an external screen

What I came up with is a neat solution that can work with almost any desk and is reasonably affordable. Here is the desk in the sitting down position.

Moving the desk into a standing position takes only about 30 seconds.

Being in a small San Francisco apartment every inch counts :) Here is a list of components used to build this beauty:

• Ikea's BESTÅ BURS
• Ergotron's LX Sit-Stand Desk Mount LCD Arm
• 2x Ikea's EKBY HEMNES, 31 inch wide
• 4x Ikea's SULTAN legs

The keyboard and mouse desk raiser were simply built with 1x EKBY HEMNES shelf and 4x SULTAN legs. Since these legs were a bit wiggly I used electric tape to get a tight fit around the diameter of the inside leg. This is not necessary, but it will make the raiser table more sturdy.

Note that the LCD Arm can be attached to the desk by drilling, that's what I did, or by mounting it on the edge of a desk. The page below from the manual shows these two options. Be careful when drilling, measuring twice and drilling once is highly advised! I ended up drilling 3 holes and than having to use wooden pegs to fill the other two holes to keep the integrity of the table :)

The other shelf was used to extend the table by placing it on top of the drawer. I have added little metal washers on each side of the shelf to stop if from sliding off the drawer.

 Other tips:

• if you get a wired mouse get one with a very long cord, I use Mad Catz R.A.T. 7;
• same for the headset, long cord is important; I use Sennheiser PC141;
• when standing up, having the keyboard and touch pad flat helps a lot; Apple keyboard and touch pad hang over the edge nicely.