Lockdown had many of us trying to figure out how to work from home suddenly and with little warning. Most people who remote work have a day job that they do on just one tiny 22" laptop screen. I'm not a laptop on the bed kind of person.
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| Starting with a recovered pallet |
In the workplace, I've lately been using sit-stand desks on account I'm not getting any younger and mostly neither is my back. Standing is great for bad backs. My physio (which is impossible to visit now in lockdown) told me I have got 2 damaged cushion thingies, and if I work out my life history, I have probably had this problem since age 15, and possibly even from much younger, so it's not going to get better. No use in complaining, but it's still there. If you are still reading that's good, because although I generally the grumpiest sod on the planet, I know it and I'm not gray all the time. Hence this blog post.
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| Aluminium camping table |
It's not exactly flexible, and I was sitting on kitchen chair some of the time. Moving everything about take time. Sometimes sitting in a couch just to curl up against the pain, eventually I splashed out big time.
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| Wait for it |
Ignore that big piece of splash out on the 4K monitor. I did not want all the money to got to Jeff, so I went to the nice little website here and got a frame and the cable management snake: https://flexispot.co.uk/electric-standing-desk-frame-ez1.html . In reality it was pretty long time in choosing which desk I wanted, but I'm limited by living in a small, but not tiny house. I needed to buy the smallest unit with smallest footprint, so it came to a toss up between the EN1 and the better EZ1 model mainly due to cost not being a limit. So this was all back in June, so on payday I put in all of my orders and took a few days of work. Soon the boxes arrived.
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| Unboxing |
It's not that hard it assemble this, but to get the desk to be narrower than the specification, you can fiddle the rotating drive bar that drives the far-end gearbox to shorten it. And when you bolt the leg on, instead of 4 bolts, if you slide it all 2 inches up to the next bolt threaded hole, the whole frame is 2 inches narrower. It's still perfectly stable with 2 bolts , and it's not possible to narrow the legs much more without taking a steel-saw to the drive rod to cheat on both sides. So I was not about to modify the desk with a saw, as that would make a return impossible. It's adjustable to wider widths, but I needed the feet to be at most 33 inches due to skirting boards limitations.
Flexispot have got friendly support people, and once I asked the right question I got the right size desk quite quickly, the other customization I did was to not buy the desk top. Due to the space I had, the desk was going to always have to be off-centre. If you buy the nice desktop they sell, it comes pre-drilled I suspect. But I'm a DIY kind of guy!
Actually I took longer to finish this desk because I had to varnish it and do all the cable tray installing. I actually ended up finishing the project during work hours one Monday. Don't tell my boss!
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| All done |
On the other hand if you are a child, these make great albeit slightly dangerous blanket forts!
So from the picture above, you can start to see some of my DIY work, it's off center because it has to fit around a hearth - which is how Victorian homes or in my case homes without access to gas are heated during winter. And that means there is a small cutout, to let it go up and down around the stove.
So from the picture above, you can start to see some of my DIY work, it's off center because it has to fit around a hearth - which is how Victorian homes or in my case homes without access to gas are heated during winter. And that means there is a small cutout, to let it go up and down around the stove.
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| Underside of desk. |
The clear/white plastic thing poking out of the hub is called spiral binding. I got mine off an electronics supplier years ago in bulk, but this it where most people might start to look to get some : amazon or rapidonline . In a prior lifetime I was a cabling contractor and fell in love with how quickly it is at tidying up lots of cables while protecting them at the same time. I bought 2 6-gang multiplugs. You can get a 10-way or something if you are prepared to pay more, but cheap as chips you can get 2 sturdy 6-way plugs with different length cords to make it all nice and tidy. Here you can see I bought baskets and screwed them on underneath. NEVER ever let the wall-warts that power something hang vertically or even sideways out of a plug-point. They will pop out at the worst possible time, and a cable tray just makes that an improbably.
So one more thing construction-wise to mention here is desk thickness. The desk motor is rated to 75Fg, which it actually does comfortably. I got my teenager at 70Kg to lie on the table with a small dumbell and drove it up and down. It is quite strong. A 12mm top is the minimum usable thickness plywood mainly due to load bearing capacity and being able to take screws without poking through. You can get 12mm screws, which are ideal, but you want to be super careful at every point if you don't go for a formed top or at least 18mm. I originally planned for no monitor arm installation here. If you install a 2 or 3 display monitor-arm system, you want 18mm thickness plywood. Formed tops are prettier, but cost more - I bought 2 "handi-panels" for 30 quid, and used the spare one for a desk riser. I used beech edging, which comes in a iron-on strip and is dead cheap to hide the beautiful "chipboard effect" that plywood has. A hot iron and a craft knife takes all of half an hour to cover up the plywood edge.
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| With desk-riser to hide a lot of the cables |
I'm going to stop rambling on now, but finish up with how I am so pleased with my DIY project and if I could change 2 things I would:
- Buy the under-desk tower-case holder from flexispot.
- Varnish it with boat varnish, not regular varnish, for hardness.
Finally my PSA warning, do not use a standing desk while barefoot or wearing regular shoes, you will feel foot pressure and calf pain due to lack of movement. Standing on a highly cushioned object like a gel mat or a just a rolled up picnic blanket keeps your feet moving and the blood pumping.
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| FINN |
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