The wife and I were looking at our disorganized corner in our dining room a couple weeks ago, wondering how we could better organize our microwave and trash can area. We wanted to build something custom to fit our needs exactly, we couldn’t find any cheap shelves or stands that fit our needs when we were looking at various thrift stores and consignment shops (where we usually look first when we have furniture needs).
So we decided to build a quick and dirty pinewood microwave stand.
The whole thing maybe took me about 3 hours to get the materials, cut and put together. And then my wife did the finishing over the next couple days.
Here’s my project area in the garage:
I needed to clamp the boards down for cutting, clamping another board on top as a cutting fence, since I didn’t have a table saw available for this project. I used my circular saw to make all cuts, but only after accurately clamping a makeshift cutting fence for each cut. Clamping was tricky since I didn’t want to dent the soft pinewood with the clamps.
After making all the cuts, the stand assembled pretty easily. I pre-drilled all the holes for the screws I used to assemble it, since pine wood, in my experience, cracks pretty easily. I didn’t want to risk cracking.
This is where my wife took over, she finished it with a light wood finish, nothing too dark, we like the natural look of pinewood.
Above is the back side and under side of the stand, you can see that some of the corners aren’t perfectly flush in the back, but I focused on making the front very clean and all the joints on the front are clean and flush. This was my compromise to allow me to get this done in a single afternoon with minimal cuts involved during the process. Quick and dirty! But it looks really nice as well.
