Standing Desk

I've wanted a standing desk ever since having a convertible Anthrocart at my last office job. Standing feels so much better for long stretches of coding or design, but there are times when I want to sit so was not quite ready to go for a dedicated standing desk at home. Nor was I willing to pay for something like an Anthrocart.

I'd notice a popular trend of using an inexpensive small Ikea table or shelf to create a standing-height work surface on a normal desk, but of course I had to try something homemade.

I made a simple trestle table in miniature, with a lower shelf acting as a stretcher which is secured by wedged through-tenons. The base and top are maple, the shelf is cherry. I was able to get the height perfect for my own standing posture and let the other dimensions unfold from there.

In this configuration I can easily stand to work on the laptop, or sit down to use an external mouse and keyboard if needed. The whole desklet easily pushes forward to create more "real" deskspace.

Building was simple work except for the wildly figured maple top. Many of my usual tricks failed on this board, and I ended up doing a lot of scraping by hand. After all that, I think the figure is kindof ugly... but it will usually be covered and it's always a good learning exercise to deal with a nasty board. I have some other boards from the same tree that are incredibly beautiful, but you never know until that first layer of fuzz is planed off.

This was in part a warmup on tenoning, since I will soon be building a full-sized dining room table.

Side project while the tung oil was curing: little locust brackets to hang some guitars so that I will remember to practice more often. Some people say guitars should never be hung, they should live in their cases. That is wisdom I accept intellectually, but I end up never playing them when I do that, and life is short. Now I need to make some little shelves for the speakers...