Building a Desk That's Helping Me in the Saddle

So I recently finished building a built-in short person desk for my office, and my fellow shortie Nicole was like "You HAVE TO write a blog post about this!"

At first I was like, "No, this is not horse related," but then I remembered L. Williams recent post in which she quoted Mary Wanless: "...we should work on our postural problems the 15 waking hours we are not in the saddle rather than the 1 hour we might actually be in the saddle. It goes a long way farther to fixing our problems in the saddle too. " and I realized it totally is related to riding!

I loved my old antique leather topped desk (it has a built in type writer!) and it never bothered me, until I took ergonomics training for my new job and realized it was way too tall for me.

Also, because the opening was too narrow for my chair, I was constantly slumped forward to reach my keyboard - putting my shoulders in a position very similar to the way I usually ride - slumpy.   Hmmm...suddenly this became a major priority for me to fix, since working from home is looking like a life sentence at this point.

Fold out typewriter!

Armed with the desk height number I needed from the ergonomics survey, I shopped for a new desk online, but quickly realized it's pretty difficult to find off-the-rack short person desks.  I also wanted to greatly increase my work surface.  All signs were pointing to DIY.

For inspiration, I finally settled on Lindsay's desk built out of IKEA Besta cabinets and boards:

I chose Besta cabinets for a couple of reasons:

- Height - they're 25 1/4" tall, which is just about perfect
- Options - Drawers, shelves, baskets, the options were endless
- Doing IKEA was faster than DIY'ing all the cabinet carcasses (yes, they are really called carcasses!)
- The IKEA Besta Planner - I was able to input my exact room dimensions and play around with it until I had exactly what I wanted, and a shopping list to go with it:

I didn't intend on blogging this so I don't have a ton of photos from the build process, but this is how it ended up:

The steps involved were:
1. Remove baseboards
2. Build IKEA cabinets
3. Buy and cut tabletop - 3/4" red oak cabinet grade plywood, one 4x8 sheet, purchased at Lowes
4. Iron on red oak pre-glued veneer edge banding to all visible edges (plywood edges are ugly because you can see the layers of wood.  Edge banding puts a pretty edge grain on the visible edges

Edge banding, which looks exactly the same as the table top because I used the same wood species

5. Stain (2 coats, plus pre-coat) and poly (3 coats).  Stain and poly gets applied to both the tabletop and the veneer edges.  Sand lightly in between.
6.  Wait forever for the tabletop to dry and cure, because you have a bird, and birds are super sensitive to things like poly.  I waited 16, long, excruciating days.
7. Install tabletops by drilling pilot holes and securing them from underneath the Besta cabinet tops with whatever random wood screws you find around the house that aren't long enough to poke through the tabletop
8. Use a 1 1/2" spade bit to drill two holes for computer cables (hole saw would also work, and would be the right option for anything bigger than 1 1/2")

9.  Insert 1 1/2" desk grommets into the holes

10. Install drawer handles (I bought these at Lowes.  Also, don't do this without a drawer pull template!  Makes life so much easier!)

It's still not totally done.  I need to add baseboards and trim to make it look really built-in, and I'm debating whether I want to add an IKEA Besta TV stand (without legs) to the left of the drawer unit, with a cushion on top so I can use it for shoe/boot/gym bag storage and putting barn boots on.  I also want to make the back of it look more built-in somehow - maybe cabinet backs underneath the desk surface on the back wall?  Not sure.

That said, I am soooo happy with it.  My feet rest on the floor, my arms are at the perfect height, and I can get my chair so far under my desk, I no longer slump.  I do tend to sit cross legged in my chair a lot and shouldn't, but that's on me, not the desk!  This desk plus some changes to the way I do CrossFit have really helped me develop the muscles I need to sit up in the saddle - more on that in another post, but it's really amazing how much things outside the saddle can help riding.