 Hey, good morning. So yeah, I'm going to talk about standing desks. Because in the past three months, I've switched from a regular desk to a standing desk, and I really like it. I built it from scratch for myself, and I ended up building two more for two of my friends. So I'm hoping I'll give you some ideas so that you guys can go and make your own standing desk, too. I live in San Francisco, and I work at Engine Yard. A lot of my coworkers already use standing desks. And they told me part of the reason they like it is in the afternoon when you get kind of tired or after lunch, they felt like it helped them stay more alert and more focused. So that's the initial reason I kind of got interested. I gave it a try, and I just worked from a standing pairing station for a few days, and I really liked it. I liked it so much that I wanted to make my own. And so that's what I went about doing. So I'm no stranger to crafts and the DIY scene. Usually that means I'm doing things like sewing dresses or making pop-up cards. But since I took up making desks, things have taken a much more industrial turn. So really the hardware store has replaced the fabric store as my source for materials and inspiration. Just to give you a little background of where I'm coming from, I had never made any furniture before. Maybe just some IKEA construction. I also live in San Francisco. So that means I don't have a garage, I don't have a car. I don't really have tools. I had a small toolbox. And even with all these kind of constraints, I was able to make these desks. Before I get into desk design and stuff, I wanted to talk a little bit about why standing desks are so popular, because it seems like there's a lot of articles right now and a lot of people are switching. I guess as developers, we spend a lot of time on our computer. And for me and a lot of people I know, that means we're sitting in the same position for a long time. Because when you get really sucked into something, you don't get up and take breaks as much as you know you really ought to. And I know that this much sitting is bad. Like, I can feel it at the end of a day or end of a week. If you spend a lot of time in the same position, your body just does not feel good. So I knew I wanted to switch. But I also kind of wanted to know some of maybe the reasons behind why sitting was bad for you. I'm not a doctor, and I don't know what's best for your body. I mean, for everyone, I think it's kind of different. But there has been a lot of studies about the effects of a sedentary lifestyle. They say, like, the conclusion of which is really that too much sitting is bad for your health and changes your metabolism. And it kind of change how at risk you are for diseases. And even in the long term, it shortens your life expectancy. So all these things were super bad. And I think the most surprising research was about people who were active, like maybe before and after work. Like, I would bike to work. I do yoga sometimes. And but because I'm spending such a significant part of the day just sitting, I would still be susceptible to the same risks. So the major takeaway from those studies was really that your body needs to move. And the muscles in it need to move often throughout the day. Not like this, but like just like moving position and then going for walks. And I think standing desk really encouraged that kind of movement because when you're standing, it's so much easier to shift positions, take breaks, walk around. And you don't feel like you're just kind of melting in your chair chair. And if you're thinking of making the switch, I think it's kind of a try it before you buy it sort of deal. You could just use a friend standing desk or a tall countertop. Or like this, you could kind of like elevate the surface of your existing desk. And just kind of use boxes or books to elevate the keyboard and the monitor. And it's important that you have the right posture. This diagram is from a company called Tinkering Monkey. They make a custom standing desk. That's pretty awesome. And it kind of shows you your elbow needs to be bent at like a 90 degree angle so that your wrist is flat. And then you need to stand about two feet away so your face is two feet from your monitor and your eyes should be at the top of the monitor screen. It's important that like you are comfortable throughout the day. So it should never be uncomfortable. And it helps to get one of these like gel foot pads. They have it at like kitchen supply stores and online. This is like $40 on Amazon. And it just kind of makes it more comfortable on your feet. I like to be barefoot, but I mean you can wear shoes too. And keep in mind, you're not gonna stand all day too. It's not like you have to be on your feet throughout the entire day. You could take little breaks. So even when people start, sometimes it might just be a half hour standing, then they switch to a stool. So it's good to have a stool right by your work station to take a break and get off your feet. Even people who stand all day are standing 80% of the day. Like they're not, it's not like a long haul. So when I started doing some research, I wanted to see what kind of desks were out there, what kind of designs I could take a look at. So these are some examples of some pretty awesome looking desks and I know not everyone is as into making their own shit as I am. So these ones I thought were really pretty. There's these kind of desks that are wall mounted. It didn't really work for my particular situation because I wanted something in the office that I can move around. But I think for some homes and maybe some workplaces, this could be a really elegant solution. If you mounted like a monitor up high, like on the wall right behind it, you could obviously make it at any height. It looks really nice. This one is from Urban Case and it's $1,500. Solid walnut, obviously really pretty, but really expensive. And then my friend showed me this desk from Ikea, similar sort of idea. It's a drop leaf table that you could use as a desk. And the price is only $50, but you could obviously see a huge difference in kind of the style and the quality. This is the Tinkering Monkey Desk. I think it looks awesome because it looks really rugged and really strong and part of the strength is coming from the X in the bottom of the legs. The problem with a lot of standing tall desks is that you have these really long legs and then it's really top heavy. So it's prone to getting kind of wobbly. And by bracing the legs with this X or with the wires in the back, it's gonna create a lot more strength and keep it really rigid. The Tinkering Monkey Desks are custom built to height and they start at $750. So this is a desk probably most people are familiar with, the geek desk. It's one of the electronics switches. It elevates, it goes down, which is pretty rad. I mean, anyone could use it and they could customize it to their height. And they could use their regular chair obviously when they're sitting. I think the thing I don't like about it is that it looks kind of like office furniture. Like it's not really my jam. But for other people, like I think it's a cool desk and you could customize it by just getting the legs and putting your own desktop on it and then you could kind of make it look a little bit different. Also, they're pretty expensive. I think they're like $750 to $1000 depending on the size. This is like my holy grail of desks. It's from the Netherlands. I don't even know how to pronounce the design company's name, so I just wrote it. I thought it was really pretty because it had such a long, expansive surface and it had those legs that kind of bow out in the A shape. And I like that there's two layers of the desktop. So there's a cubby in between so your desktop won't get cluttered. You could stash some stuff, but it doesn't look bulky. It was really awesome, but when I did like a little price conversion, it was like $2,800. So I use this as inspiration for one of the desks I make when I first decided to make a desk for myself. And this is the other like pinnacle of standing desks from Italy, the Stilvall C2 Maximus. I don't even know how much it costs. It doesn't even say on their website. You're supposed to contact them. So that's some like, that's like Louis Vuitton shit. Like it's like probably really crazy, but really beautiful and really finely articulated little wood movements and stuff like that. So as you can see, like there's this trade-off. Like you could get a really beautiful awesome desk if you're like totally balling, but if you want something that's, you know, more affordable, they kind of don't look that awesome. And so I think one of the reasons I really like doing stuff yourself is you're gonna control the budget, the materials, the quality and kind of like what look you're going for. So when I was looking for inspiration when I wanted to make desks myself, I didn't even limit myself to the standing desk because you could look at regular desks. I just think how could they be taller? You know, like, so I looked at blogs like Core 77, Apartment Therapy, furniture store called Design Within Reach. And just to look at some good looking desk and think about like, oh, if this desk was a standing desk, it would just need to be elevated and you could put a brace on the legs to keep it from wobbling. And then you look at, I looked at tables like this and I was like, this is so beautiful. And it's because it's a really solid piece of wood. It's really just has a heaviness and richness because it's like such a solid surface. Another thing to keep in mind when you're doing it, making your own, is that sometimes the desk top and the desk legs are cutting from totally different sources. So you might need to paint something or make sure that it's gonna kind of jive and match. So it looks like when you have dark wood, it looks good with color or dark accents. But when you have a light wood, it looked good with white or silver accents. So the first desk I made, I called it the Ikea hack. There is a website called Ikea Hackers. People share kind of unique things they did with their Ikea furniture. And yeah, people are pretty creative. It looks pretty rad. So I wanted this one to be affordable, something that'd be easy to assemble because it would be from Ikea and kind of accessible to everyone. And in my mind, I'm still thinking of this $3,000 desk and wondering how Ikea could translate into this. So I looked on Ikea Hackers and there's a lot of standing desks in there, but a lot of them were not the look I was going for. Like I wanted something kind of light and airy and I didn't want it to be bulky. And I think a lot of things had just multiple tiers and kind of looked kind of stacked up together in little Frankenstein. So I really didn't really find a desk that really suited what I was looking for. So when I was at Ikea, I found these legs called Galant. They're just A-frame desk legs and they're adjustable. So the height it could reach was 35 inches. And I'm pretty tall, my elbow height was like 45 inches. So I would need 10 more inches of desktop to kind of make up for that gap. And I went around the TV unit area and I realized that without the little legs, this could be a desk with a cubby. And this one called Black was only $50 and 10 inches tall and it was perfect. So I brought my haul back to the office. It was very easy to assemble because it just used the little Ikea key. And I set it together and this is what it looked like. It wasn't too bad. The trickiest part was really attaching this TV unit to the legs. And it was tricky because if anyone has maybe been a college student before, you know that Ikea furniture is not like really solid or made to last. Like you couldn't just put a wood screw in it and expect something to stay and be sturdy. Like it would just pull right out because inside the Ikea wood is just kind of particle board and dust and glue and black holes. So I centered the legs and I decided to put a bolt all the way through from that bottom surface all the way through the legs. So I marked the holes and I used a drill and as soon as you get through that like fake veneer surface, it just falls right through because there's like nothing in there but this weird sawdust that clogs your drill. I used these really big washers. I wanted to maximize the surface area where it's touching the desk so that it wouldn't like cause the hole to get all crazy. And you can see the washers inside. And this is what it looks like at work. For how easy it was to put together, I was really happy with it. And I like that it's adjustable so that if someone else wanted to use it, we could just twist the legs to make it a different height and lower it. The second desk I made was for my friend Robin. So she wanted a standing desk but we're going to Europe next week and we didn't wanna spend any money on anything but our vacation. So her challenge was that she wanted a desk and she wanted it to be free. So I knew this was gonna be a real test on my resources especially because I knew I wanted to get it done so I could show people how to source for like a free desk. But we ended up resulting to Craigslist or like started using Craigslist for a couple of the pieces. So this is actually the almost frequent. It ended up costing about $30. The basis was this tabletop. It was a broken table that was on the sidewalk. It was free. It had one leg, the surface was kind of gross. So we decided to use it as a tabletop. It's about one inch thick of like solid wood top and then it has that lip around it that's kind of like a faux thickness. It's not really that tall, it's one inch. And we measured her elbows to be at 43 inches. So we needed 42 inches legs. And for free, I started looking at all sorts of crazy things and thinking like what could be a leg? Like what could we make a leg? And she had this good idea to look on Craigslist and do a furniture search for 42. We found a lot of crazy 42 inch things. But what we finally decided would be usable was these pair of bookcases. They're just these short bookcases. We were able to get them for $25. And they would work as legs. We'd put one on each side and they'd be stable because they're already box shaped. And then we could use the shelves to store all the things that are in our existing desk. I really like having a wood surface. I think it looks just kind of rich and nice. But the desk wasn't for me. It was for Robin. She hates it. Like she totally didn't want it. She wanted to paint it this kind of bright blue color. So I had to concede to her wishes since it's for her and her office. The paint she got was from Kelly Moore. Kelly Moore has an oopsies section. Like it's $3 gallons of paint. And it's because they tried to mix a color and it didn't match whatever the customer was looking for. So it was really inexpensive. We painted the back of the bookcases too to match because it was just particle board. Then we sprayed it with a sealant and brought the pieces to our office and assembled it just using some wood screws. She also was thinking about keeping clutter minimized and having places for everything. So she painted these little hooks and we bolted them to the side so she had a purse and a jacket hook. And then we went to a store called Daiso. Daiso's really awesome. It's a Japanese like $1.50 store. Has a lot of desk organization accessories. So we got these trays that could kind of help keep her stuff all organized. And she was worried about the top surface getting maybe marred from water marks and stuff. So she got this beverage tray there was $1.50. So here's what her workstation looked like on her end. And here's what it looked like from the office. For $30, she was really happy and it went with the look she had at her work. And it doesn't yet have a stool in this picture or the gel mat because she got that the next day. She just brought a stool from her kitchen and she went to a kitchen supply store where you could get gel mat for by the foot. And it was only $12 for like four feet. Okay, this desk is my favorite. So obviously I got a little bit more confident in like my desk making skills at this point and decided I wanted to do something that was really cool and really custom. This one's for my coworker Andrew. He sent me some links of what he liked. And it was this kind of steel pipe construction of a frame and reclaimed wood as the top. And there's a couple of companies that are doing desks like this. These are from Etsy and you know, they range from like 600 to thousands of dollars. So here's the initial design thing that I had in mind. And it was just gonna be a tall desk with an H shape to brace the legs. It's all using a one inch galvanized steel and we're using T joints to connect it. At the top of each of the legs, there's a circular like steel disc called a flange and that would be used to bolt the tabletop to it. At the end, I thought we could have adjustable feet but that was hard to do. So I just used regular end caps. The budget was like $300. And my coworker Val took me off to this countertop. It's also from Ikea, but it's nothing like the Ikea furniture for that TV unit. Like in their kitchen remodeling section, you could actually get really solid pieces of countertop. It's an inch and a half thick. It was about $130 and it was really long like 73 inches long. You could see that it's much stronger than that. Like I would never try this on the other Ikea furniture. And the hardest part was it's unfinished. So you need to sand it, you need to stain it, you need to seal it. So the sanding bit was probably the most like physically demanding. We started with 180 grit and then went to 220 so to make it really, really smooth. And I tried out lots of different stains. Like I did, got four little samples and on the back end, I just did little strips so you could see what it does to the wood. I went with this one called Early American on the Oak because it looked a lot, it was very close to the oak's color. And I think that like, if you're gonna stain wood, you don't wanna try and turn it into something it's not. Like it's good to kind of like let the natural color shine through. So this is two coats. Well, this is me applying two coats of Early American. After that I used the lowest gloss polyurethane finish that they have. It's called a satin finish. Another tricky bit was getting the right lengths of pipe. So we did that diagram, we checked what happens when you put two pipes in a T-joint and what kind of height were you need because it needed to be also 45 inches tall. And we went to Lowe's to get pipe cut. And you can get pipe, like steel pipe cut at Home Depot, Lowe's or any plumbing store. And it's not very expensive, it thinks like $5 per cut. And you don't need to cut all the pieces because you can get pre-cut pieces for like the shorter lengths. So we got these four cuts and I thought that I would go there and say like, hi, I need 32 inch things, four of them. They would disappear, they'd come back and say like here are your lengths. But that's not how it is. You're in the aisle and you tell them what you want and they pull this machine from out the aisle. Like it was tucked in there. And then with no goggles, no gloves. And people just shopping, they cut it like right there and it's like cutting oil is spewing and little shavings, it's pretty intense. And so I brought them back, they were kind of greasy. I think because of that cutting oil or like pipes just have this kind of grindiness to them. So I had to take off all the stickers and use imitation TSP to get rid of the grease and create kind of a tacky surface. And I wanted to tack because I was gonna paint these legs after that was assembled. Screening them together was not too hard. You just like make sure they're really tight and wear gloves because all the edges where they did all the like cuts and stuff have little sharp bits. We tested this for strength as well. It was very strong. And then I painted it white with a primer that's especially made for galvanized steel aluminum. So after it was dry, oh also, since I didn't have a garage, I used the rooftop at my office as like my after hours garage. So a lot of the things were just on a tarp on this deck. Here's what it looked like after I painted it, just a matte black, just using regular paint because it was already primed. And then I brought the pieces into the office and I assembled it by attaching the desktop to the flanges using a wood screw. You just drill a guide hole first. I'm really happy with how it turned out. It's my favorite desk and it feels really, really strong, really stable. And I like that it's big enough to be used as a paring station or like me and my coworker Andrew could stand next to each other because we're kind of the same height. One more detail I wanted to do make is that monitor stamp because you need the monitor to be elevated and usually people just use textbooks or reams of paper and it doesn't look as awesome as the desk. So I went to the hardware store again and we got some eight inch blocks cut of nine by four inch pine. I mean these two blocks I think ended up being $6 with the cutting fee. I sanded them a lot and then I used some of the leftover wood stain and I stained them kind of a similar color. And here's what it looked like when it was done. I really like it because I think it kind of matches that kind of lo-fi like non-tech look of the desk. So I hope that I gave you some ideas and some inspiration so that you can kind of go forth and make your own desk. And if you do, it would be awesome if you sent me pictures or links. I compile the list of bookmarks to all the desks that I mentioned here on my KIP list. So just a list of bookmarks and I wrote actually three blog posts for the desks I made. I'm gonna probably tweet those or post them to that KIP list today after my talk. Okay, that's it. Thanks so much.