I’m on holiday and my parents are in town, so I was chatting with my dad about how to modify one of my Ikea Galant corners into a standing desk. Since standing desks are all the rage I’ve been thinking about modifying my desk (instead of spending money on a new one, though they are nice.)
Some of these mods include lifting up the legs, but my dad was concerned about how stable that would be, even though the cinder block mod looks like a nice easy solution.
So, instead of lifting the legs we wondered if we could leave the Galant frame alone on the ground, and just lift the top of the desk instead. So, we put our heads together, and then measured the frame of the desk. We went with 8 x 2x10 pieces of wood and then stood them on wideways on top of the frame. We needed some screws and L things to keep it solid and then we just reused the holes in the Galant:
And my dad proud of the final product:
It’s 43 inches tall. In hindsight I wasn’t expecting the bottom part to be so visible, otherwise we would have made the front there one piece of wood, but slicing up 2 boards into 16” pieces was cheap and easy to disassemble and assemble. I will likely make a little cloth skirt thing up front to hide that, after I figure out how to recable everything. After that it’ll be the ambient lighting but not while I live in this apartment, though that will be the final goal.
Anyway I hope this is useful to people as it’s been great for me so far and is cheap. We took the extra wood and made little side shelves too. The metal thing you see line tied to the bottom of the frame is an extra long power strip that we suspend upside down under the desk (a nice way to keep cables off the ground).
It took about 3 hours to finish with all the family bikeshedding and going to Home Depot included.