Oh for a Standing Desk!

I did it! She's mine, and she's a beauty. After a couple of years of reading articles on how sitting is making us slower, fatter, and more likely to die early, I now have my very own standing desk: no sitting required. Which is pretty cool.

For a while I tried to figure out how to make my current desk a standing one. Raise it somehow? It was ridiculously heavy, and that was never going to look good. Add something on top of it, just a small platform to allow me to stand sometimes or not, depending on my mood? Again, kind of hard to figure out.

That left pretty much only one option: a new desk altogether, which pushed the project back a bit. And then I found out that standing desks are ridiculously expensive or incredibly tiny, without any options in between, and that sort of killed the idea of getting a desk from a regular retailer.

See, there are a few difficulties with standing desks. One is that the desk needs to be custom built for you, or adjustable. Everyone can be made to sit at a pretty uniform level (by using the same chairs) but people stand at wildly different heights. Well, making a desk adjustable makes it more expensive. Ditto with a custom built desk.

So I decided to circumvent the whole problem, and see what I could come up with on my own. I looked into a couple of IKEA hacks, but they looked a bit shoddy and had no storage space, which I desperately need. So I decided to combine the top of this desk with some elfa parts I got at the container store that just so happened to be the perfect height for a standing desk for me.

Score!

And then Evan put it all together, bless his heart, and working at my computer changed drastically. I find I'm much less inclined to surf the day away on the internet (much less - even when I'm not supposed to be working I'll do something else instead of whiling the time away at my computer), and I'm more productive as well.

Also, standing is hard work! After a couple of hours, you really feel it. I bought a stool as well, since you're not supposed to stand all the time, and I use it to take a short break every once in a while.

Yay for my new standing desk! Now I just need to do something about the wall behind it - it's a mess!