Building a home office
I've always been a bit of a desk setup nerd.
As a kid, I was blessed with a really nice desk space for gaming. "Spoiled" is probably the word.
Since I moved out for university, I made do with whatever space was available to me: a tiny desk in halls, a table barely large enough to hold a laptop in a spare room, through to the iPad on the sofa.
During the pandemic, when working became not just an option but a necessity, I invested in a little gaming desk from Argos. It served a purpose, but the black finish attracted a lot of dust and wasn't really ideal.
After getting a new 24" iMac last year, and a 27" Samsung second screen, there really wasn't enough room for everything I needed on the desk.
During this time, I'd started following /r/Battlestations on Reddit, and grew positively green with envy. My "needs must" set up was no longer cutting it, and whilst I accepted that I wasn't likely to have a view of downtown Manhattan or the Swiss Alps through the window, I figured there must be room for improvement.
So, in a rare example of pre-planning and shrewd purchasing, I embarked upon a project: to build my own home office that I would not only be comfortable in, but actually want to spend time in.
I made a list of the essentials:
- Standing desk
- Dark colour scheme
- Ambient lighting
- Much bigger work surface
As it turns out, the much bigger work surface was the tricky bit. There were plenty of nice standing desks available online, but generally only going up to 160cm width. As my current desk was already about the same, I know I wanted a wider surface, and aimed for 180cm.
Conventional wisdom online was to buy a countertop from IKEA, and attach it to the standing legs myself. The standing legs themselves were consistently expensive, and I quickly realised that this approach was going to cost a lot of $$$.
As they say in the North East, "shy bairns get nowt", so I asked Anna's dad whether they had any spare kitchen surfaces at work. Lo and behold, a 200cmx60cm prime oak surface was available at cost price, but I'd have to oil and treat it myself. "No problem!" I thought, after all, it was a bargain.
After squeezing it into my car (and I do mean squeezing here: one substantial pothole and my front and rear windscreens would be gonners!) and purchasing my standing desk frame of choice, it was time to get down to business.
Because I've always been one for instant gratification (the fact that I was building this myself was, in itself, a miracle) I decided that it was impossible to wait. I was going to do the whole thing in one night.
And I did.
Just about.
Firstly, I dismantled the old work desk, removed the shelves from the walls and painted the two walls I wanted. I'd been applying coats of Danish Oil to the work surface outside, praying the heatwave would persist and it wouldn't rain. Once all this was done, I built the standing desk frame up, drilled the desktop in, and attached cable management trays.
All in all, the process took about eight and a half hours. By the end, my back had seized and both knees had carpet burn. But I was very satisfied.
There's still some work to do in terms of cable management, and wall art, but by and large the project was done.
The TOPSKY standing desk is fantastic. It's stable - even at full height - and moves quietly and quickly. The desk itself is the perfect size, and despite weighing about 15 tonnes, I can't imagine working at a smaller space.
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