My Adventures With A Standing Desk

🗓 Posted May 30, 2013

By Brandon Brown

Once upon a time I inherited a desk. Now, this desk was not your normal run of the mill desk (well actually it was mass-produced by IKEA, but I digress). It was an IKEA FREDRIK desk. I loved that desk to the bone and the only reason I ever got rid of it was because the friend that I borrowed it from wanted it back after he came home from out-of-country for a few months.

My first standing desk (same desk, not my picture though)

The FREDRIK desk is by far the best desk in the world because it serves dual purposes: one being that it can easily be a sit-down desk, but the other is that it can transform into a standing desk! I’ll never forget the back pain I was experiencing from sitting for 8-10 hours straigh during my university studying. During this time, when I came home at night the only thing I wanted to do was stand upright. This made it very hard to play some video games on my PC. It was then after some errant googling (I had no idea what I was searching for) that I found the concept of a “standing desk”. I immediately gawked at the fact that I have to strictly STAND at a desk for lengthy periods of time. At the time I thought this wouldn’t solve my back problems, until I began to research why I had the problems in the first place. Within about twenty minutes of doing research, my opinion on standing at a desk took a 180-degree turn and I was sold on the idea.

Another significant achievement I made was when I found out the desk I was already using could easily be converted to a standing format! Upon completing my optimal arm-height measurements, changing the height of the desk, and putting together my gaming setup on my newly transformed wonder, It looked similar to what you see below (photo shamefully stolen from blogmarketingacademy.com, please don’t sue me!)

The setup of my first standing desk (not my picture though)

Fast forward two years after I give back the desk, graduate university, and sit for another 8-12 hours a day at my job and an all too familiar pain starts to creep it’s way back into my life. I try to put up for it because I’m too busy to modify my established setup, but after 4 months straight of stress and gruelling back pain, I finally said enough is enough. I researched the latest techniques to transform a regular desk into a standing desk on the cheap and I found a solution that works quite well. I went to my local Home Depot and bought the necessary supplies (some table legs and a simple pine shelving board) for about CAD$60 altogether. Below is a picture of the final result.

All-in-all, it came together quite nicely for a hacked solution. I’ll eventually paint the legs black and stain or oil the top tier a slightly darker colour to help protect it.

Here are some resources to get you started with your own standing desk if you desire:

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