Kitchen Wall Baskets – First Woodworking Project

My first woodworking project is officially finished and hung on the wall! Customized wood backing for some new kitchen wall baskets! In the future I want to give more background on the project process, and things I learned along the way. But as you know, this blog is a work in progress 🙂 So for this first project, a quick summary and then a little bragging. Because, if I do say so myself, this didn’t turn out half-bad!

It all started with a cluttered counter top. Really! We were (really, we still do) always piling things onto the kitchen island. Mail, veggies that needed ripening, keys/wallet/sunglasses, flowers (every kitchen needs a vase of flowers, right?). And then there was no space left to pile all the dinner making ingredients.

So I found some baskets on Amazon that I liked, and seemed like would be able to hold the “kitchen extras.” (I even measured a few key items like avocados and small canning jars I use to hold nuts and things.) I was totally planning to just hang them on the wall. And then Hubby had another great idea (you’ll see, he’s really full of them!) – why not get some nice wood to mount them on first, and then they would look more finished, and like they belonged there. Great! So we bought some wood at Home Depot … poplar, two pieces that were already the right size (since we had no saw or way to trim them), and thin enough that it would look aye-ok just mounted to the wall. Well that was the idea anyways.

And then there was a black Friday sale at our local Lowes. And I convinced Hubby that we needed a miter saw. We bought a 12-inch sliding Dewalt complete with stand. And if you’re going to cut wood, you REALLY need to be able to finish off the edges with fancy designs. Right? I could just see the hook-boards and wall-organizers I had imagined for the entry, laundry, garage taking shape. And somehow within another day or two we ended up investing in a router. We did some research, took some advice from our trusty home-improvement store experts, and ended up with the Bosch variable-speed fixed/plunge router combo.

Now that we had these new tools, of course I was going to use them! So the simple board-backing for my baskets ended up a liiiiittle more involved. Nothing crazy, but I did take advantage of the router and made a nice finish on the edges with the 1/4-inch roundover bit. I used a combo of minwax stains until I got the shade I was looking for – something to blend with the cherry cabinets in our kitchen, and then a simple polyurethane top coat to seal the deal. Check out the finished product!