My Standing Desk, Part 1 - Choosing a prototype

Knowing that I'd be working from home full-time for the next little while, the first thing I was worried about was the (even more) lack of physical activity I would be having... it's not inconceivable that I would not leave my house at all Monday through Friday.

In hopes to improve my sedentary lifestyle, I started looking into using a standing desk as my day-to-day desk.

I had a couple requirements:

• It must be adjustable: Standing desks are expensive and if I realize that standing desks are not for me, I want to at least be able to revert back a "regular" desk.
• It must be wide: I have a 3-monitor setup at work that I'm not willing to give up, so whatever desk I choose must be able to fit all three.

A quick browse around the net and I quickly realized I had at least one more requirement:

• I don't want to spend $800+.

Standing desks are expensive. Nice ones can easily cost more than $1000... that's not easy to justify when a typical workdesk from IKEA costs just $179.

The cheapest "standing desk" I could find was VariDesk, but it didn't satisfy my second requirement of supporting three monitors.

One option that I am extremely excited about is Stand Desk. It's a funded Kickstarter that aims to be an affordable, adjustable standing desk. At $399, I was all...

...until I realized that it was still US-only.

That's when I decided to turn my efforts towards IKEA Hacks: building a standing desk out of various IKEA parts.

A couple examples I found were:

In the end, I chose to build my standing desk similar to Rico's from MidnightCodr. I'll talk about why and my slight modifications in Part 2... Stay tuned!