I have been standing at work since 2011. In January I started my new job and quickly felt the impact of sitting all day... sore back, stiff knees and ankles, basically feeling crippled. Whereas my last job had an adjustable desk surface and all I needed to do was add an LCD shelf, my current desk has a fixed-height surface.

I researched the standing workstation options that are available. Most of the "add-on" standing workstations or desks out there have the same fatal flaw... they put the monitors on the same surface as the keyboard. For proper vertical posture with the head level and the neck not bending down, the monitors need to be elevated so that the top of the screen is at eye level.

The Ergotron Workfit Sit-Stand is now priced under $400 and would be a really great option for a lot of people. There are also various IKEA furniture hacks that I considered. Instead, I decided to build my own out of scrap wood from my garage. I only spent money on spray paint and the LCD mounting arms.

The platform that I built is heavy and strong enough to allow a "c"-clamp style LCD mounting arm to attach. It is also robust enough to hold a conventional keyboard tray so I have also been able to fine-tune the position and angle of the keyboard and mouse.

If my legs, feet, or back get tired I still have a seated desk area and my laptop available.





I bought the dual-monitor LCD arms from Amazon for under $50. The only real issue with these is that they had a tendency to slide down the pole over time or as they are being adjusted. I fixed this with a quick hack of drilling in a self-tapping metal screw as pictured here:




Spray-painted plywood is not the most beautiful surface in the world, but it's good enough for this situation.



One other note is that the poster hangers I found are really great. My office walls are painted concrete block. These poster hangers allowed me to easily hang my posters from the bottom of a shelf.