Hi all!

I think the title says it - I would like to build an adjustable height desk out of wood and currently think of ideas to do that. The standard options online tend to be sort of ugly imho, really expensive, and/or have various electronic components that can fail and are hard to repair.

Some features that would be great to have:

• adjusting height doesn’t take too long. It should be feasible on a daily basis, e.g., for standing in the morning and then sitting down, standing up after lunch again etc.
• adjusting should also be feasible by one person alone
• at least 2 different heights (standing and sitting), but it doesn’t need to be super flexible otherwise.
• it can’t be attached to the ceiling for example, because I’m not allowed to drill holes here
• robust enough to hold the weight of a monitor and things office workers have on their desk (maybe a water bottle, coffee mug, 2-3 books, their arms, …)

My first thought was this table template by Enzo Mari. It allows you to adjust height, even different heights for the front and back of the table. But it seems difficult to adjust on your own and I don’t need the added front/back flexibility. However, in combination with a magnet or spring mechanism to fixate the height, this could be nice. I don’t know how to build such a mechanism though and would be grateful for pointers!

Another thought was to extend the legs above the height of the surface and pull the surface up with a pulley mechanism.

This guy built a nice table, but has the same problem with changing height.

But I’m really open to other ideas as well. Any ideas/pointers/suggestions are very appreciated!