 We just made the ultimate standing desk converters and we'll show you how we did it right now. What is up, welcome back. Do you like to do it, builder or make it? Well, we do too and we do it every Friday. This week, we're making the ultimate standing desk converter. Ultimate. Like many of you, we're working from home now and we needed a second office. So, bye-bye, guest room makeover. If you remember that video, we repurposed some furniture, refinished it, added some chalk paint, some wax, and created a great looking guest bedroom. But now, out goes that furniture. Actually, we passed it on to our 15 year old. She got a queen size bed now instead of her little single bed. That's right, upgrades, upgrades. And hello, new desk. If you remember just a few weeks ago, we created a new desk. It was for that new second office space. With that said, now my commute is much shorter than it used to be. I go from master bedroom to guest bedroom. It's like a good 30 feet. So, it's kind of hard to get those steps in throughout the day. And I have been doing a lot of online training, giving the video training. So, I've been trying to put my laptop on a crate and the crate is just a little too tall if I sit and a little too low if I stand. So, I've been doing a lot of squatting and talking to the camera. So, I have some thighs of steel. Not really, they just hurt a lot. They just hurt a lot. So, I started doing a little research. I started missing my stand up desk from work. So, I went a little research to see if I could find myself one. And I did on Amazon, but they're a little bit expensive. So, I slipped it into the Amazon cart hoping that it would pass. Oh no, I saw them and I was like, no way. No way, that's $150. Like one was like $150. The other one was like $100 and they looked wobbly. And I was like, we can totally make that. Yes, in typical Garrett fashion, he refused to purchase it. We had to make it. So, I took that and did a little research on Pinterest, trying to see what options were out there. And we found a couple of versions that we thought would meet our needs. But nothing was exactly the way we wanted it. So... Some looked a little chunky. Some looked a little wobbly. Some, I didn't know how they were defying gravity. So, that's the purpose of today's video. We're gonna show you what we came up with with our own design. Step one, we're gonna gather all the requirements. Kim is gonna act as the user and the tester. I'll be the designer and the developer. The requirement number one needs to be adjustable because, obviously Garrett needs one so he doesn't continue to work on those thighs of steel. And I also want one, but we're different heights. So, I think the monitors are gonna be at different levels. Definitely. And that leads me to requirement number two. I also wanna be able to move it. I don't want it to stay permanently on my desk. It could be, I may want it on my desk, I may not want it on my desk. Which leads us to requirement number three. I wanted it to be no tools. If I'm gonna make it mobile, I don't wanna have to put it together. I don't wanna have to disassemble that thing and move it to another room. Or lose a little Allen wrench. I want this. Can't tell you how many times he's looking for an Allen wrench. It's like the bane of his existence. Not this one. Not this one. It's never the right size. It's never the right Allen wrench. Never. And requirement number four. I wanted to have enough workspace. So I want, I had a lot on this one. I was a little bit bougie on this one. I want space for my laptop. I want space for my keyboard. I want space for the mouse. I wanna move the keyboard. I wanna put my notepad up there. I just need space. Requirement number five. It needs to be stable. As I talked about before, I guess I get lazy when I start standing for a while and I tend to lean on it. So I wanted it to be nice and stable and be able to support a little bit of weight. And I wanna be able to lean on it while I'm watching a video call. Or a conference call. You wanna be able to take a nap while standing. Gotcha. Gotcha. So those are my five requirements. I only have one requirement. And that is snack space. I need to be able to have all of my room for my laptop and monitor and my snacks. I wish I could show you a picture. I actually asked Garrett if I could show you a picture of his actual office. There must be five Mountain Dew bottles. Some packages of crackers, graham crackers, cheez-its, granola bars. He's a cruncher. Step two. Now we make a design based on the requirements. I don't know any AutoCAD, CAD, SketchUp. Somebody else was supposed to learn that. I'm working on it like it's hard. I'm trying to use it and have not figured that program out yet. So I used Adobe Illustrator and I came up with a design. I came up with a design based on the requirements and things that I saw in the Amazon cart and on Pinterest. She agreed that it looked like you would meet the requirements. And we went right into step three. We took that design and we made a prototype out of cardboard using the glue forge. And I'll let Kim test it. Kim's gonna give us her results. So I have it right here. First of all, it's a tiny little guy. It was just a concept. It's a concept. Just a prototype. All right, so this includes, oh, maybe I should put it together, facing you all. Here are the two sides, here are the feet. You're gonna put these little pegs right here in the, oops, that one's upside down. That one's upside down. Pegs in the feet and the base. Get in there. All right. Oh, I might have crushed this one. It's okay, prototype. This was just the prototype. And then we added a little stabilizing bar for the top here. If I can get it together. This isn't as easy as it looks. And then the brace, the center brace. So this has two little legs. This one's a little short, but you get the concept. And then the shelves. So here are super cool adjustable shelves. Thank you so much. A big shelf and a little shelf. So I expect a big shelf to kind of be my workspace and a little shelf. All right, that's what we got. Yeah, so how cute is this little guy, right? I was like, yeah, that'll do it. That'll work. That'll work. That'll do it. Yeah, so what are our lessons learned? What are the test results, Kim? Well, seems a bit flimsy. So I'm not sure it's good. I'm not sure how it's gonna work when it's full size. And it's kind of tiny. I can't, I can't, I can't lean on it. I still can't lean on it. It is a Mako. It is, it isn't full size. It is like third size, one third size, I guess. But it was enough to start with our step. What was it, step four? No, step four. We go into prototype number two. We moved on to eighth inch MDF to try to see if we could get a little more sturdy, a little more real world example. And I added some tabs so that that middle brace wouldn't just fall out. And I tightened up the little slots a little bit. So what do we got? So, this one looked good. I was pretty comfortable with this one. Still too small. I still can't lean on it. But, Still gotta tighten it up. Yes, it's still, what we learned, what we really learned from this one is, if we don't have these notches exactly right, the shells get wobbly, the brace at the top gets wobbly, therefore the whole thing is kind of wobbly. Step five. I think I got a lot of stuff figured out. I think I gotta tighten up some slots. I made the tabs, I adjusted the tabs a little bit. And I want full size, so we went beta test. Yeah, I was tired of the tiny models. So give me something full size. Full size. Quarter inch MDF, cut it on the X-Carve. And here's where our first problem hit. When I was putting this in, I broke the tab off. And every time you made one, he wouldn't give me instructions, he just said, do it. I just give her a stack of wood and I'd say, all right, put it together. Can you figure it out? Can you figure it out? Yeah, I'm a puzzle master. What I learned from this one is again, we've gotta keep these, this one's nice and tight, this one isn't quite as tight. The tabs at the top were a little skinny, as I easily broke it, I just popped it right off. And, oh, the base for the feet, the little notches were small, and we actually had to carve these out a little bit to make them fit in there. Yeah, again, the feet were super tight, so. And since the tabs were thin, I had to make them a little beefier, so I thought I'd round everything off and give it that aesthetic appeal to it. Oh yeah, so I mentioned to him, well, this is square at the top, this is round, these are square, we need to make this thing consistent. So, we did come up and finally build prototype number four, we want full size. And half inch plywood. Now we have half inch plywood, so these corners are now rounded and gave a little more room for the notch and it can't break it. It actually can't break it as easily. And then here's the center brace with two notches. Again, trying to make it nice and sturdy. Oh, wait a minute, I think I have to put that in first. Lessons learned. So, this is great, this is a lot sturdier, I mean, it's not ever gonna have no movement, so it's a lot sturdier, it's a lot thicker. At this point, it is leanable, I can lean on it. This desk is pretty tall, but I can lean on it. My desk in my office is not quite this tall. And it's got plenty of room for my keyboard, my mouse, my laptop up here, it's wide enough for my laptop. It's great, I actually used this prototype for a month. All unfinished like this and everything, so it wasn't pretty, but it was definitely functional. And from here, we made just a few small tweaks and we're ready. So the tabs were still difficult to get in and it was still a little hard to put together with one person. So I tried to simplify the middle bracket and I kind of rounded everything out. Production number one. So we're working with the same design. So I rounded the little tabs that go into the base. The little feet tabs. We use the better sanded ply, still half inch sanded ply now. So these brackets are now exactly the same. They both use the rounded edges and the tab design. So they're interchangeable and you don't have to question which one goes where. And look at the shelves now, they look so great. Now they're not just squared edges where I was poking my arm before. So now these are interchangeable. I've actually used them both ways. So you can have a small shelf for the top and a smaller shelf, I mean the bigger shelf for the bottom so I could put the keyboard on there and plenty of room for my mouse and a work surface. Looks good, see? There you go. No tools. I feel like it's met all of the requirements. It's even got a space for my snacks. That's what I asked him, where you get to put your snacks. He goes, I got all kinds of room down here for my snacks. This is all snack area, especially designed snack area. You can come at it from any way, access the snacks. So it's definitely adjustable, no tools assembly. You saw the stacks that I picked up. I think they're easily movable and stable. So I think I hit all five. Yeah, looks nice. I think I hit all the requirements. So we've tried to post different versions of this throughout the design life cycle and you guys have provided a lot of great feedback. And thanks to Ingrid who shared that this could also be used as a display table. So you can put your product display multiple shelves and I thought that was a really great idea especially since we will be going to a farmer's market this fall, I thought this would be a great place to put different items for displays. Oh yeah, farmer's market, we'll be selling it. Do you have any suggestions for what else this could be used for? How about requirements? What requirements do you have? Yes, what new features and functionality can we add to it for version number two? We'll be offering the cut file in our store so you can make this yourself. And if you don't feel like making it yourself, if you don't feel like doing all the cutting or you don't have a machine that can do it, we'll be offering the finished product in our store also. Oh, time to go. We gotta go, we'll leave you with some final shots and we'll see you next week where we'll do it, build it, or make it again. This is my only face.