I have a nice little home office in a finished basement, but as winter closes in here in New England, even with a daylight spectrum lamp I really start to feel the lack of daylight. Since I have a nice heated space with windows over my garage, and I use a standing desk riser on a built-in desk in my current workspace, I got one of Flexispot’s motorized standing desks and put it together. Now I have a bright, airy new space with a back saving desk to move into.
If you just want to know about the desk and skip my experience and tips on building it, this is the E7 Plus model, with a 55″ dark bamboo finish top. This specific model is brand new and isn’t actually available on Amazon yet (although you can get it direct), but there are so many different size, style and color options that are available from Amazon that you can just pick the size, color and two- or four-leg configuration you want, and take advantage of Black Friday deals up to 34% off.
Flexispot E7 Plus Standing Desk Quick Take
Like any Flexispot product I’ve ever used, build quality stands out the most—I have a Flexispot office chair, which seems to be carved out of solid chunks of aluminum. And like my chair, the desk is rock solid, with legs and supports made from thick, nicely welded steel with a heavy, durable coating that didn’t chip at any point during assembly or shipping.
Once I had it together, I was genuinely amazed at how stable it is. Even at it’s tallest setting, it literally feels like it’s bolted to the floor. I even did one of those influencer-style tests and lay down on top of it and motored up and down. There wasn’t a wobble.
Disclaimer: Flexispot provided this desk for review. Neither myself nor Bargain Hunter received any compensation for this article, and any and all opinions and impressions are strictly my own.
Unboxing
The downside to this is that all that solid steel is HEAVY. It comes in three separate packages, two that weigh 54 pounds and a 43-pound desktop. This whole process involves moving a lot of weight around, so if you’re not confident in your ability to hold 45-pound leg subassemblies up and screw things into them, and later on turn a 150-pound table over, make sure you have a helper. I didn’t and I feel like I got a nice core workout.
As usual, Flexispot’s packaging is very good. Heavy boxes like these always get banged up in shipping, but everything was protected extremely well, and you’re going to have a lot of cardboard and foam to recycle. While the fasteners were well marked, I was disappointed that nothing else was. It mostly wasn’t a problem, but I’m pretty handy and it would still at least have been nice to have an arrow on the underside of the desk saying “FRONT,” rather than trying to interpret the pattern of dozens of tiny pre-drilled holes.
Building the Flexispot E7 Plus Standing Desk
Assembly was about par for the course for any piece of furniture: Some instructions were a little unclear, I had some fasteners left over and I had to drill a hole. The desktop came sandwiched between two 55-inch pieces of foam, which made a great surface to work on and prevent scratches. I should have used one for my knees, too. It took me about three solid hours of work, some of which was just dealing with all the packaging.
It comes with the usual assortment of (four!) Allen wrenches and you need either a long Phillips screwdriver or a cordless driver of some kind.
Tools required (any links are to the actual tools from my shop that I used):
- Cordless screwdriver (you could use a #2 Phillips, but your hands will thank you)
- Included Allen wrenches
Tools I recommend:
- Cordless impact driver for screw and Allen bolt driving (carefully!)
- Flashlight for finding holes
- Rubber mallet for aligning legs
- Hex bit set for Allen bolt driving with impact driver
- T-handle Allen wrench set to save your hands
Tools I ended up needing:
The Ikea-style manual includes instructions for all the E7-series desks, and they are very similar, so that wasn’t an issue. You’re supposed to connect the two leg assemblies with a bar (like the bottom in the picture above) and then attach them, but that was way too unwieldy and hard to line up with the little holes. Instead, placed them first and then added the bar. I’m not even sure how much if any strength those bars contribute, since they’re not held on by much, but I added them.
I ran into two problems building my desk. One very minor one is that there are two steel parts called “baffles,” that had no corresponding holes in the underside of the desk. I left them off. A little more important is that there were also no holes for the main control unit that attaches underneath, and which everything plugs into. I used one of the many superfluous existing holes, and very carefully drilled another.
Attaching the control panel, and wiring it and the motors into the control box was very easy, because they are all modular plugs and you can plug them into anywhere on the box they fit. There are several included stick-on cable wraps to help with dangling cords, although they could be larger and easier to use. They stick well, though.
Conclusions
It’s hard to come up with an adjective for my Flexispot standing desk other than “rock solid.” Some of that is the same weight that makes building it and moving it around a hassle, but if you’re potentially going to have one of these more than four feet off the ground, you don’t want it to be flimsy. Building it was a bit of a journey, but so is putting together any similar furniture.
Unlike a lot of other affordable office furniture, however, my experience with Flexispot is that it makes very high quality desks and chairs at very good price points. Pick the size and style that suits your needs, invite a friend over for the afternoon to help, and send whatever you were using for a desk before to the curb, because you’re not going to need it any more.
