The First Build: What Happens When You Stop Buying Furniture and Start Making It

There is a distinction between a space where work gets done and a space that actually makes you want to do it. For most of 2023, my home office had become the former. Dark, cluttered, full of accumulated objects that had long since stopped inspiring anything. I would sit at my desk and feel the creative resistance immediately, that specific flatness that settles in when you’ve outgrown your environment. Something had to change.

2024 arrived with a fun and driven energy. I was attending red carpet events which was a direct result of the fitness commitment I’d made a couple years prior, that had quietly restructured my entire daily rhythm. In addition, I was in the middle of a creative shift significant enough that my surroundings needed to reflect it or get out of the way. My step count had become something close to a spiritual practice. The discovery that I could walk and work simultaneously, knocking out 30,000 steps on a walking pad while building an entire website in a single afternoon, felt less like a productivity hack and more like a personal revelation. If my body needed to move to think clearly, then my workspace needed to accommodate that completely.

Which meant I needed a different kind of standing desk, not the ones that exist on the market, with their unsightly exposed inner metal legs, but something more considered, more chic. I desired something that looked like it belonged in the room I was building rather than something the room had to work around.

I had admired a particular desk for years. The silhouette was exactly right: clean, architectural, quietly commanding. But it was not a standing desk, and no version of it existed that met every requirement I had. So I did what felt, at the time, like an audacious decision and what feels now, in retrospect, like the most obvious one: I built it myself.

All I had was a photograph and a few measurements. Everything else came from instinct and an unwillingness to settle, for which I’m no stranger to! Challenge accepted.

I engineered a soft-closing drawer with the kind of satisfying resistance that makes you want to open it just to close it again and again. I designed subtly angled legs that gave the piece its own distinct identity rather than mimicking anything that already existed. I widened the surface bed to accommodate my iMac, my notebooks, my various desk decor, and of course, the kitties, with room to spare. And the detail I am most proud of: I concealed the inner metal standing desk legs entirely within the outer wooden structure. Every standing desk on the market, at every price point, exposes those inner legs. It is accepted as an inevitability. I decided it was not.

Were the hidden legs as flush against the outer structure as they could theoretically be? Definitely not. But this was the first real furniture first build I’d ever achieved, and the standard I was holding myself to was simple: does it work? And that it did!

I spent months at that desk. Recording Against The Odds with Audible, building websites, and planning the next chapter of everything. The little cuddles from Kishmere and Mapleton as they’d come up and rest their little furry bodies on the empty top space of the desk, was magical. The desk held all of it without complaint. It earned its place in the room and then some.

But what stayed with me long after the build was complete, had less to do with the desk itself and more to do with what the process had taught me. Building something from nothing, from the first sketch through the final sanding, was one of the more quietly transformative experiences I’d had in a long time. I had taught myself a trade. I had solved a problem that the market had not solved for me. I had moved through the complete arc of an idea and come out the other side holding something real.

It is not as complicated as the industry would have you believe. It requires determination, a willingness to be wrong and correct course, and the fundamental conviction that if you cannot find what you need, you are capable of making it.

And… I’m excited to say that I haven’t stopped building since! There are several pieces in development that I am not ready to share just yet, but when the time comes, you will understand why I waited. Good furniture is worth the patience. I learned that the hard way, one very long afternoon with a saw in hand and a measuring tape in the other, and no one to tell me it was possible.