Work from home desk setup

Shubhan Chemburkar

January 8, 2022

Having a great working desk is important for a good developer. Since the pandemic, working from home is the new normal. Us developers now spend at least 8 hours of the day on the desk at home, trying to work through all the meetings and assignments.

After using the old desk through this work from home setup, I decided to try a do a new setup. Out with the old, in with the new!

Few months back, I purchased a new IKEA Bekant Desk and IKEA Alex drawer cabinet online.

Purchase experience

After some researching for one or two weeks, I went ahead and placed the order on IKEA.com.The orders came in 5 days later via a third party delivery service. The delivery was made to my front door.

Assembling the desk and the drawer cabinet was a whole day job. This was my first time purchasing from IKEA and took some time to get used to the assembly process.

The quality of the drawer is good, feel there could be a bit more smoothness in the drawer rails.

The table is quite stable and balanced. No shaking or jiggling. Will it last for a long time? That remains to be seen, since the materials for the underframe are mix of metal and plastic.

Overall still quite good though, albeit somewhat pricey.

New Desk Setup

The new desk top is a white stained oak veneer with black steel underframe. This is a stand/sit desk, however I have kept it as a sitting desk only.

Going for the minimalist look, the on the desk are two FHD Monitors from Dell. Along with a power extension for connecting phone chargers. (Most probably this extension will go under the table with a two-way adhesive tape.)

For keyboard and mouse, I prefer wireless using Logitech K230 keyboard and Logitech M331 mouse. The mouse is super light and comfortable to use.

That's it, there is nothing more on the table (usually).

My chair is a standard Farenheight office chair. Not too fancy, but works well.

Under the desk

Cable management is the key! I have kept all the cables that need to come from the top to a power source or desktop, through the IKEA cable net-mesh that comes with the Bekant desk.

Also under the desk is a pi-hole running on a raspberry pi 1 and a UPS system.

On the Drawer Cabinet

I keep my work laptop on the ALEX drawer cabinet. This saves some space on the desk and also makes it easier to access the laptop if required.

The drawers, are filled with random electronics like spare phones, chargers, cables etc.

Whats Next

I am looking at a few things that I could do to make this setup better. Things like a small LED lights strip above the desk. Better power extensions from the UPS system.

I do wish the keyboard had backlighting, may be next time I'll purchase one with backlighting.

Discussion

What do you think? For any suggestions or your own desk setup, please start a new discussion on GitHub Discussions or at Twitter @shubhan3009.

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