I asked twitter yesterday for DIY standing desk advice, and I got some great stuff — a lot of you have some pretty cool setups!

Sadly, I also remembered that a trip to Ikea from here is an all-day experience, and I won’t have a free weekend again until, umm, March maybe? So this is standing desk 0.1 pre-alpha, designed to get started today using crap I already had around the house.

I did end up spending $13 on the white shelf; it’s a shoe shelf from the closet organizer aisle at Home Depot. I was looking for something that was (a) close enough to the right height to work on it for at least the next few weeks and (b) wide enough to handle either the laptop or the desktop keyboard. (I use two machines rather than a docked laptop. Because reasons.) It’s about a half-inch too high, but once I get a decent floor mat, that will just about even out.

The second shelf was basically a bonus — I was looking for the right height, and this is what I found. But it turned out to be the best part of the design, and when I upgrade to a properly built standing desk, I’m definitely going to incorporate storage shelves in some way. It houses the Mac Mini, charging space for devices, a drawing tablet (not used often but now always at hand), the desktop keyboard while I’m using the laptop, and VERY importantly, the pile of paper clutter that used to be on the desktop, now much more neatly contained. So much better than having all of it out and competing for space.

Monitors are behind the desk on some cheap wire shelving we had in the shed, on top of a tv table. It’s way more rickety than I’d like, and I definitely wouldn’t recommend it in an earthquake zone. To get the right height, I’m also tossed in the two thickest totally out of date computer books in my library — to give you an idea, one of them is on HTML4. This whole piece of the setup definitely needs revising, but it’s workable at least for now. One advantage: using the shelving gives me even more storage space, albeit not as easily accessible as the shelves on the desk — my next step will be to use some of that space to clean up the crazy mess of wires you can see under the desk.

So, tl;dr : 13 bucks and some junk cleaned out of the shed. Tons of storage. All of it beaten with an ugly stick. Revisions to come!