Have we found the perfect RV desk?
Have we found the perfect desk for our RV office?
Have we finally found the perfect RV office desk? Is there such a thing as a desk that works for sitting and standing in an RV? We think so.
The story of work on the road
If you haven’t been following our adventure, we work from the road. A lot. While some people travel to find great hikes or incredible adventures, a lot of times we go to beautiful places and then sit in the trailer and work. It’s an unfortunate consequence of the life we’ve chosen and make for ourselves and we are not complaining.
We like it, actually.
But what we haven’t liked as much is the RV as an office. And that makes sense because RV designers aren’t always thinking of working from the road since a lot of RVs are used casually on weekend getaways and such. But studies are showing a few things including the fact that RVers are getting younger and more and more use them to work on the road.
Including us. Well, except the getting younger part. None of us are doing that.
So we’ve made lots of changes to our RVs over the year to accommodate the fact that we sit on our butts and work a lot of the time. We’ve taken out theater seats and replaced them with rolling chairs that we detailed in our article about creating an RV office.
When we upgraded our RV in 2024 to a Rockwood Mini Lite 2506FK we chose one with a u-shaped dinette figuring the included table would actually work well for us. But that table turned out to be a bit wiggly. And, we also upgraded the cushions in our dinette as the factory ones were a bit tough on the butt after a day of sitting.
At home we have sit-stand desks - Peggy has one that sits on top of her grandmother’s desk and I have a standalone model. We wanted these for the RV too and finally found them.
The desks we chose
Peggy is a master at finding cool stuff on line (her track record is flawed; however, because she also found me online!) and she found these Flexispot side tables on Amazon. In many ways these are like hospital tables in that they have little wheels and can be raised and lowered to accommodate different heights.
The mechanism to raise and lower the table top itself is not unlike the piston spring in many office chairs - you grasp a lever and the desk raises up. These desks can go from 26” to 41.7” in height so they really have a good range of adjustment.
Also, two of these would fit into the dinette space so we can each have one and it’s easy to individually adjust the height to what each person wants.
Overall we found these desks to be very sturdy - there’s no wiggling as there was with the table that came with the RV.
The units themselves are about 28 pounds so they’re not exceptionally light but not ridiculously heavy either. The legs and feet are a decently thick metal and the tops we chose are an “engineered wood” product. They have multiple surfaces available including a couple of wood-look surfaces but you can also get white, black and pink. We got white.
What’s on the desk?
The table top of these desks measures 27.6” X 15.7” which works well for us. We each have a MacBook Pro and a second monitor on our desks and we hold these with these UGreen tablet and laptop holder stands that sort of raise the computer and monitor up and allow us to angle it to our own liking. Of course there’s also a mouse and keyboard.
The monitors we’ve chosen are 17” USB-powered 17” 4K monitors and we’ve been rather impressed with these. Peggy and I work very differently - I like the monitor to be vertical since most of my work is written and Peggy likes hers to be horizontal as she does a lot of video and audio editing.
I have also been known to use my iPad Pro as a second monitor but this only can be in vertical mode, there’s no using it in horizontal mode as a second monitor. Boo, big bummer, Apple.
Assembly required
Some of you may know that I am more Tim the Tool Man Taylor than Bob Villa when it comes to putting things together but these desks arrives with very clear instructions and even the tools to do the job. The steps were clear and concise and everything fit together quite well. Overall a quick and easy job, quite frankly.
One of the things we did not do is install the plastic cup holders that came with the desks. While I would like to be able to use these I can see them not surviving a whole lot of the awful roads that we traverse. Not that the cup holders themselves would be the issue but the desks banging around in the RV would inevitably damage the cupholders.
Also, as for storage while driving, we’re likely going to set the two desks on their sides in the floor of the slide room while in transit.
While these tables are designed so that normal people (not us!) can use them as bedside tables, and they would probably be pretty good in that capacity, we like them very much as desks in our RV.
