How To Make An Easy DIY Wooden Footed Tray

Whether you use it to elevate a dining table centerpiece, or as a decorative accent on a shelf, a footed wooden tray is a beautiful accessory that will instantly add visual interest to a vignette or side table. The most popular style of wooden tray, often called a riser, is the ever-popular rustic farmhouse-style tray.

While you can easily buy a footed tray online, or at your local home store, it is so much more fun and personal to make your own.

Building your own footed wooden tray, or riser, is an easy DIY project that lets you decide exactly how the end product turns out.

Using a piece of scrap wood, I created a DIY wooden footed tray with a modern look.

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This post was originally part of The Blogger DIY Challenge a few years ago, which is no longer an active challenge. The task was to make a footed tray and decorate it for the holidays.  

A couple of years ago my husband and I renovated our first rental house.  We gutted the tiny little kitchen during the renovations.  Since the place is so small, there really wasn’t any room for a kitchen table.  Instead, I designed a custom island on castors for the small kitchen that my husband built.

The top of the custom island is made of wood planks with a beveled edge.  This was the first time my husband had created a beveled edge, so he practiced on several pieces of wood, which ended up in a scrap wood pile at our home. 

Every now and then I get inspired to pull out one of those wood pieces and make something with it.  

My idea for the challenge for a modern decorative tray was the perfect project to use up those beveled edge scrap pieces of wood.

All I needed to do was to sand it down with an orbital sander and add some stain, and some type of foot to the bottom of the tray.

A project that should be easy enough to pull off.  Until I tried to find wood pieces for the feet.

Finding small wooden pieces in the right size for the feet of the tray was a bit of a challenge.

Finding something to use to make the feet of the tray turned out to be a bit more challenging than I expected.  I didn’t want something too large or clunky but I also didn’t want them so small, like a cabinet knob, that would just disappear underneath the board.

My first choice was to go to Home Depot and buy premade cut wood feet.  They ended up being too big and chunky for the tray I wanted to create.

A trip to Lowe’s proved to have the same problem, the precut wood feet are made for larger furniture projects.

A few days later, I went to Michaels™ craft store for Cricut™ Vinyl for a different project.  On a whim, I decided to walk through the wood craft section to see if they had any options for my footed tray.

And Then I found this wood-turning log.

Not sure exactly what it is for.  It looks exactly like a stack of small bun feet.

There was only one of them available on the shelf so I was lucky to find it.  Turns out, it was the perfect size and diameter to cut apart to make the four feet I needed for my footed tray.

Which is exactly what I did. 

I borrowed my husband’s hand saw and cut the turned log into four equal sections for the feet for my footed tray.

Using a 220-grit sanding block, I gave the rough edges of the newly cut feet a light sanding.

I always have several cans of wood stain to choose from in my craft room stash, so I decided to use the MinWax PolyShades in Honey Satin.  This is the line of stain with the Polyurethane top coat already in the stain.  But first I treated the feet and the scrap board to a coat of MinWax Wood Pre-Stain Conditioner.

I gave the board and the feet two coats of stain, lighting sanding them down between the first and second coats.

To make sure the wood feet were in the same location on the bottom of the board, I measured half an inch from both edges of each corner to find the exact placement for each foot.

A dap of wood glue on the bottom of each foot attached the feet to the bottom of the board.  I allowed this to dry overnight to make sure each foot was securely attached.

At this point, I could have just stopped the project and ended up with a beautiful-looking Farmhouse tray.  But if you remember, I wanted it to have a more modern look.

Since I wanted to give the design of the wood-footed tray a modern touch, I decided to paint a gray stripe lengthwise down the center of the board.  This also helped to cover some slight imperfections in the scrap wood board.

Using my ruler, I measured from the center of the board and spaced out a four-inch stripe down the length of the board.

Once again I went to my craft paint stash for ideas and selected a small sample size of gray paint from another project.

The color is Behr Natural Gray.

The final step for my version of a DIY wood tray was to add cork to the bottom of the legs for stability.  The cork also works well to keep the feet from scratching the table surface. 

Since it is just a few weeks until we enter the Fall season, I decided to decorate my DIY footed tray with pumpkins and some fresh flowers.

Even if I don’t decorate my new DIY wooden footed tray for a holiday, it still looks great in the middle of the dining room table with a plant and decorative salt and pepper shakers.  

Now that I have made one of my own, I can see why these have become so popular in stores.  The ways you can use them to elevate the look of a centerpiece or shelf are endless.

Don’t have a pile of scrap wood to make a similar wooden footed tray?  

There are so many great and different ways to make a DIY footed tray.  Just by combining things like an old picture frame, a piece of plywood, and cabinet knobs, you can easily make a one-of-a-kind footed tray.   I would also suggest finding something to use in a thrift store.

Let your imagination guide you!

Thank you for visiting and reading through this post on my tray tutorial.  I have done a lot of DIY projects for my home and this blog, and this was definitely one of my favorite and easy DIY projects to make.  

My mind is filling up with more DIY tray ideas.  Not only is it a great idea for using up scrap wood, but also for holidays and gifts. 

Hugs,

Proverbs 17:22 “A cheerful heart is good medicine, but a broken spirit saps a person’s strength.”

More posts to visit and enjoy:

DIY Footed Bucket Planter

Serving Tray Makeover – Before and After