Take A Standing Desk From Boring To Beautiful With A High-End DIY

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Everyone agrees that standing desks are the epitome of functionality. They're good for morale, productivity, and health. But while they're a wonderfully useful addition to any office, standing desks can be a bit of an eyesore. They're often bland, and their motorized metal legs are far from the beautiful vintage desks that you see in magazines. If you didn't think of this design issue before buying a standing desk, there's a simple DIY upgrade you can make. With some salad bowls and contact paper, take your standing desk from boring to high-end.

To do this hack, you need round, wooden salad bowls. Instagram user chrystalking_, who demonstrates the DIY hack in a reel, uses 10 salad bowls from IKEA, each costing about $25. It's important that the bowls are hemispheres, since you'll be joining them together to form wooden globes. You'll also need some tools and supplies, including a jigsaw, sandpaper, wood filler and varnish for the salad bowls. Because of how many supplies are required, this is a pretty advanced DIY. If you're able to rent or borrow the tools, though, you should be able to do this DIY even as a beginner. The idea is to cut holes into the salad bowls to fit them around the legs and arrange them to look like beautiful wooden spheres. Because the bowls are not attached directly to the desk, the motorized legs can still function normally. This DIY also uses Safiyya marble peel-and-stick contact paper to cover the desk's surface.

For the leg part of this DIY, start by creating a hole in the center of the salad bowls, like in chrystalking_'s Instagram reel. To do this, use a jigsaw to cut out the bottom of the bowl. The holes do not need to be perfect circles, but they do need to be big enough to comfortably fit the desk legs through them. The best way to do this is to measure the legs of your standing desk and create a hole that's at least a few inches bigger in diameter.

Use wood filler to attach eight bowls together to create four spheres, leaving two bowls aside unattached. Use sandpaper on all salad bowls, including the spheres and the two half-spheres, and then cover them with several coats of varnish. Chrystalking_ uses dark varnish to make them look like more expensive deep hardwood. The spheres can then slide onto your standing desk's legs, creating the illusion of a more complex piece of furniture.

For the surface of the desk, you could try some colorful paints to brighten up your home. You don't need to use the peel-and-stick marble paper if you already like your desk surface, or you could use our DIY IKEA desktop hacks to add some more flair to your standing desk.