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Make It: Modern Wooden DIY Desk Organizer

by on Jul 27, 2015

If you follow us on Instagram (and you should!), you’re privy to the hints we’ve been dropping about our new Curbly Headquarters in Minneapolis (the word ‘headquarters’ sounds so commanding; I’m sticking with it). After sharing a co-working space for the last few years, we finally decided it was time to rent a space of our own and we’re very excited to share it with you in a few weeks. 

Amid the new coats of paint, the recovered chairs, and the IKEA-hacked furniture, we’ve been working on some smaller projects that will make the new office our own. We teamed up with Minwax to create a desk organizer that brings just the right amount of woodsy beauty and OCD organization to my desktop. Read on to see how we did it!

You don’t need a ton of woodworking skills or tools to make this project come together. We used a router for some of the trickier stuff, but you could easily forego those steps and do the whole project with a drill and a jigsaw.

We loved using the Minwax Wood Finishing Cloths to apply a one-step stain and finish to our project. For a small DIY like this, they’re perfect: 1-hour dry-time, soap-and-water cleanup, and plastic gloves are even included in the package.

Here’s the step-by-step…

Materials

Supplies:

Step-by-Step:

1. Figure out how wide you want your organizer to be. This will depend on how much stuff you want to put in it! In my case, 14 inches felt about right (we mocked it up in cardboard first to make sure). Measure twice, mark the cut line in pencil with a speed square (or a ruler) and make the cut (we used a miter saw, but a jigsaw works too).

measure

A chainsaw cutting wood

2. Next, you’ll want to lay out all the organizer holes on your wood. We opted for a few pencil slots, one wide slot for scissors and the like, a slot for a phone, and a little tray for sunglasses/keys. There are no rules here, just try to balance the empty space and make things even and consistent. 

Man drawing lines with the help of triangular scale.

Lines and circles marked on a wooden piece.

3. (Optional) Next, we used a router with a bowl bit to cut out some little receivers for the pen and pencil slots. This isn’t really necessary, but it keeps things from slipping around. We also routed out a tray for sunglasses (using a guide to keep our lines straight and make a nice rectangle). This takes some practice, so if you go for it, we suggest a few trial runs on scrap wood first.

Man sanding a piece of wood outdoors using a power sander.

A person is using a black and red tool on a wooden frame.
We rigged up a guide to cut the top and right side of the tray. Then we moved the guides to cut the bottom and left sides, and removed all the center material.

(We also used our router with a plunge bit to cut out a stopped slot for my phone. Easy to do if you have a router, but again, practice first!)

4. Time to drill the holes in the top piece of wood! Any time you want to drill a clean, finished hole in wood, you’ll want to have a piece of scrap over the entry and exit (this stops the bit from blowing out the fibers of the wood when it goes in and out of the material).

A power drill is drilling a hole into a wood block.

Another tip for drilling nice, vertical holes by hand (i.e. without a drill press) is to whip up a simple little jig (as pictured). 

After the pencil/pen holes were drilled, we put four stopped holes on the top of the bottom piece, and the bottom of the top piece. These holes were the receivers for the brass tubing that held the project together. To drill stopped holes at a consistent depth, create a drill stop by wrapping tape around your bit, as shown.

A block of wood clamped with a red clamp is being drilled in its corner.

5. With all the holes and trays drilled, it’s time to sand the whole piece down.

Pieces of a wooden desk organizer waiting to be assembled on a white table.

A man uses a hand sander to sand a wood cutting board.

6. We tested a few different shades on a piece of scrap wood. We settled on the Maple color. 

Man with gloves cleaning the wood with cloth.

A person is wiping away stain on a piece of wood.

Different colors of brown are found on a swatch.

7. The Minwax Wood Finishing Cloths make wood finishing projects like this really easy with minimal clean up. The cloths come in bags that open up like baby wipes (NOT BABY WIPES THOUGH! DON’T USE THEM THAT WAY!). You just put on the gloves (they’re included) and grab a pre-moistened cloth, and get to work. In about an hour the stain and finish is dry and ready for another coat (if desired – we liked how our project looked after one coat). 

A really nice thing is that the Wood Finishing Cloths include wood stain and polyurethane protection in one step, so you don’t need to add a clear coat after you stain your wood. 

Using the Minwax Wood Finishing Cloths
(Sorry for the weird color tone on these pics … I think something about the overhead lighting didn’t agree with our camera)

8. Finally, put the top and bottom together by inserting the brass tubes into the stopped holes. You could use super glue or epoxy to hold them in there, but honestly, ours felt quite sturdy without any adhesive. 

I’m in love with this little organizer. Just have a look at it from all of these angles!
 

Desk organizer with mobile phone, goggles, pens, pencils, notebook and clips.

An open notebook with a grey pen on it with a blue cap next to three little potted plants which is next to a small brown shelf with pens, scissors and a flower notebook on it.

  

"A Desk is neatly arranged with Vase, Laptop and Wooden Stand"

  

A brown mini table with colorful  trinkets on top next to a laptop.

  

Wooden desk and a laptop

Pen holder stand with a book and some paper clips in it.

What do you think of this organizer? Do you have any good DIY desk organization ideas? Let me know in the comments!

We partnered with Minwax to create this project. All words, images, and opinions are mine alone. Thanks for supporting the brands that support Curbly!

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