DIY Standing Desk: Part 2

It has been just over a year since I built and blogged about my DIY Standing Desk. These days, I work from home 2 days a week and work from my standing desk probably 80% of the time. When I first built my standing desk last year, I considered it an experiment and chose not to sink much money into it. But after a few months, I knew I had done the right thing, and over time I added more upgrades.

 

Standing Desk: V1 (@April 2015)

 

Standing Desk: V2 (@July 2016)

One of the first things I added was the AmazonBasics gel mat. My feet were getting fatigued and I knew that a good gel mat would help that out dramatically.  $40 well spent!

Then I added a set of Cyber Acoustics 2.1 speakers & subwoofer, as I love to listen to tunes while slinging T-SQL. This was just an inexpensive set that I had bought years prior and for my garage workspace.  And it works well enough to jam out tunes and give me that touch of bass.  At some point (probably around Black Friday/Cyber Monday), I’ll probably invest in a nicer more powerful 2.1 speaker set and a FiiO E10k DAC. I use the latter at the office with my headphones and love it.

Last fall, I became fed up with the scavenged wire shelves that held my monitor & laptop stand. I knew I was satisfied with my standing desk by that point, so I made another trip back to Ikea to add on a proper monitor shelf. I borrowed another idea from the Internet, purchasing Capita brackets & a Lack wall shelf. An hour later, I had a super sturdy & solid monitor shelf!

When the 2015 holiday season rolled around, I decided to finally upgrade my ancient 22″ monitor. While I’m normally a dual-monitor fan, I decided to go with a higher resolution, larger single monitor solution instead. Additionally, I knew I wanted a monitor greater than FHD (1920.1080) to enhance my workspace. After much research, I settled on the 27″ Acer K272HUL. I really liked the idea of WQHD (2560×1440) and preferred a 16:9 aspect ratio vs 16:10.  And I definitely do not regret the decision to try this.  The monitor is beautiful.  It is mounted at the proper height and distance, and I feel that it gives me a tremendous amount of screen real estate to work on.

To complement the new monitor, I also invested in some Antec LED bias lighting that was conveniently on sale. If you’re not familiar with bias lighting, this How-To-Geek article is a fantastic introduction.

Additionally I added an APC SurgeArrest P11VNT3 protector. Prior, I’d only been using a cheap power strip, but between two laptops, an iPad charger, phone charger, & monitor, I’d run out of room. I wanted more peace of mind, especially since I would now be keeping a second laptop there at all times. And of course, it was conveniently on sale.

A second laptop? Back in 2010, I purchased my first gaming laptop – a Sager NP8690. Sagers are the US rebrand of another company called Clevo, which make fantastic modular gaming laptops. My first Sager had served me well for 4 solid years, but the graphics card finally couldn’t keep up with the latest games, so I purchased another Sager in 2014.

Except for a dead battery, my first Sager was still a solid machine. I swapped in an SSD and it was back in prime condition. It has a great deal of horsepower underneath the hood, making it a fantastic base for my SQL Server VMWare Workstation lab. Now it lives as a underneath my standing desk, with its own dedicated keyboard & trackball. I just use Duplicate Screen to run it exclusively on the 27″ monitor, with its own dedicated HDMI connection.

So that’s my DIY Standing Desk as it is today. Usually I have my work laptop hooked up on the stand, with its own dedicated keyboard & trackball. And whenever I feel like switching to my personal laptop, I just hit the power button underneath, shift around keyboards, then switch the Input on my monitor.

My original investment was about $115. All of the above upgrades, minus monitor & second laptop, ran me about $120? So about $235 for my entire setup? Amusingly the monitor cost about $300! Nonetheless, I look at it all as money very well spent!

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