As many of you know, I recently moved back to Los Angeles from Atlanta. Wanting to avoid the headaches of moving companies and cross country shipping, I sold all of my furniture and decided I would use this as an opportunity to rethink my home office setup. Though I'm still crashing at my parents for now (its okay, I'm a millennial & we do these things), I decided to start getting my desk set up properly so I could be most productive until I was in my new apartment.
After a few hours spread out sporadically across the course of a week, here is what we ended up with:
My main focus here was cable management. I wanted the desk to look clean and chic so I'd always have a motivating space to work. I still plan to add some LED strips to make it more colorful and to make me look like a real hacker so it's not completely done.
So how'd I do it? Here's everything I used for my clean & cable-managed work from home setup:
Home office cable managed desk
Ingredients
1 standing desk (this one is different from mine because mine is no longer available for purchase)
8 screws
Tools
Power drill
Set of drill bits
Phillips screw driver
Tap measure
A pencil
Instructions
Build the desk
First things first, you need to build the standing desk. Follow the instructions from the manufacturer, obvi.
Outline where you will clamp the monitor mount
Put together the dual monitor mount. If you use the one linked above, they send you all of the tools you need and an easy-to-follow instruction manual.
I put mine right in the center. Measure your desk with the tape measure, divide by 2 and use that as the midpoint. Mark this midpoint with your pencil.
Attach the clamp and outline it under the desk with your pencil.
Once you've drawn the outline, remove the clamp and flip the desk upside down so we can attach the raceway and surge protector.
Attach the raceway & surge protector
The key to this setup is being able to properly hide all of the cables that make your setup work. We'll be using the raceway as the "junk drawer" for any cables you want to hide.
Line up the raceway under the desk, keeping mind not to overlap the clamp outline (I learned this the hard way unfortunately).
Take your pencil and mark 6 drill holes. You'll want two on each side and two in the middle to support the weight from the cables.
Leave the cable raceway on the desk put the surge protector between the raceway and the desk frame beam.
Use your pencil to mark up the drill spots to mount the surge protector.
After you've marked all of your drill holes, remove the raceway and the surge protector from the desk.
Grab your power drill and drill where you marked, being careful not to drill through the desk. Just enough to give your screw an easy time going in. *Make sure you are using the correct drill bit size!! If you drill the holes too big, the screws won't have anything to screw into.
After drilling all of the holes, use your phillips screw driver to attach the raceway and the surge protector.
Connect the desk's electric motor (for the sit/stand height adjustment) to the surge protector and hide the extra slack in the raceway.
Flip the desk right side up.
Use the cable clips to bring the cable from the motor up against the bottom of the desk if you can see it hanging once its right side up.
Attach the monitor mount & monitors for real this time
As before, clamp on the monitor mount.
Attach the monitors.
Plug the monitors in to the surge protector you just mounted and hide any cable slack in the raceway.
Plug the HDMI cables into the back of the monitors.
Use the velcro ties to hide then 4 cables behind the monitor mount.
Easy peasy, you'll have a "wireless" home office setup in no time! Don't hesitate to reach out to me on Slack if you have any questions about the setup!
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