Convertible Standing/Sitting desk

A lot of health-conscious folks at work convinced me that standing is probably better for me than sitting all day. They ended up turning some filing cabinets on their side and mounting their external monitors to that. When they got tired and wanted to sit for a few minutes, they were forced to abandon their external monitors and just use their tiny little laptop screen. I couldn’t settle for that.

I first built a prototype with plywood and brought that into the office to decide what I liked and didn’t like. I ended up tweaking the dimensions a bit and adding some structural supports on the side. When lowered, the support on the right doubles as a table-top extension, and the support on the left is thick and serves as a foot for the surface to rest on. There’s also platform on the back to keep my monitor mount from bottoming out.

All the wood is red oak finished with linseed oil and wax, and the supports are just perforated angle that I painted white.

I routed a small slot to hold my cell phone upright–I thought that was a nice touch. Everyone was disappointed that I didn’t permanently glue in a cable to charge it :)

I salvaged a gas shock from an old car (held the trunk open) to help assist in raising the top. It turned into a much bigger project than I’d anticipated, but I’m overall pretty pleased with how it came out!

-- Adam, Rochester NY