Standing in front of my new stand-up desk I’m experiencing an unexpected sense of freedom.

I wanted to try a stand-up desk for years. Several people I know recommended them but the problem is: my desk is huge, it’s well organized, and I didn’t want to spend hundreds or thousands of dollars on something I may or may not like.

I spend many hours a day in front of my computer and my posture sucks, always did. I would love to do anything I can to improve my posture, but I didn’t know whether I could physically handle standing in front of a desk for so long.

Need a cheap experiment! Good thing I have a workshop and some left-over MDF.

Figuring out the correct height of the stand-up desk was very hard. I found some advice on the internet telling me to have the desk just under my elbows. Better lower than higher the guy said. Made sense.

My huge L-shaped desk has three legs, so I built three boxes to raise each leg by 40 cm. The MDF was free and it’s not the best looking thing but glued into a box it’s strong enough. My computer and power bar had to be raised together with the desk so a couple of the boxes are wider than they would need to be for the desk alone. The boxes measure:

• 65 cm deep (legs are 60 cm)
• 25, 35, and 35 cm wide
• 40 cm high

And they were assembled like this:

And this is the result:

The 25-cm-wide one looks tippy, but it’s quite stable. I’m not worried about this falling down.

Close-up on the finished box in place:

I just started using it so I can’t comment on how well it’s going to work long-term. But it only took me a couple of hours of work to build and it looks better than I expected. So I’m already happy about this project whether I will end up keeping the setup or not.