Easy Wood Tray for Less Than $10!

by Brittany | Our Home Made Easy

5 Materials

$10

1 Hour

Easy

This wood tray is perfect for beginners and easily expandable in size (adding 5 rails rather than 4). I love adding home decor, but I can't always afford to buy everything I like. This project is perfect because it's so budget friendly and anyone can make the wood stain/paint to coordinate with their own decor!

Using a Miter Saw, cut your wood using the dimensions above.

For a more detailed tutorial, including building plans, check out the blog!

For this, you will need a Kreg Pocket Hole Jig. If you don't already have one, consider investing in one. It has made our DIY abilities sky rocket AND it's super easy to learn how to use. It's like instant DIY build gratification!

Drill your pocket holes using the illustration above. As a guide, begin 4" in on the first board, 9", then another 4" from the other side. For the second board, the dimensions are 6" & 9". Continue with the 4/6/9 pattern as shown.

Line up your wood bottom as shown in the illustration above. Use clamps to assemble the boards, one at a time. To avoid board warping or cupping, Jordan had a vise clamp attached to a straight board. This kept the pieces from moving while being joined (see the picture below).

Next, use your right angle clamp and begin joining the tray & sides together with the middle screw. Fasten together. Move the right angle clamp to the outside edges as you continue assembling.

Once assembled, run a sander over the tray to desired texture.

Apply your stain and poly! We've made two of these. For the first tray we used a statin gloss, which left no shine. We used a higher shine poly for this tray.

Here the tray is as a 5 rail (instead of the 4) larger tray. You can see we chose a different poly. I include cut measurements for the 5 rail over on the blog.