Desk Stationery Organiser with pin and chalk board sides

This project was a spur-of-the-moment "Pinterest request".

Without any prior planning, I was given a picture from Pinterest and asked "Can you make me something like this?"

The pin in question was this desk organiser:


I found some thin plywood offcuts that were roughly 2/3s to 3/4s of the length of a new pencil, so figured that was about the correct height.

The length of the offcuts was slightly longer - approx 9 1/2 inches. It seemed a bit too much to split into 2 4-and-something inch pots, so rather than cut it down and create waste, I'd make my desk organiser three pots of roughly 3 inches each.

For the width, I figured it would look best if the pots were square, so I found some other offcuts and cut them to 3 inches.

The end result is a three-pot desk organiser with pots of that are 3x3 inches by somewhere between 4 and 5 inches tall.

For the base, I cut a length of pallet wood and cut grooves along the position of each of the middle dividers, and in turn cut a short section of each divider, so that the dividers would sit in the grooves:


On one end I cut a finger groove, as sticky notes are a standard 3x3 inch square, so one of the pots could be used as a dispenser for them.

I took apart a 'corkboard' (which turned out to be a thin veneer of cork over cardboard, and glued this around one side and the back.
On the front (the sticky-note side) I took part of the cork veneer and glued it on - purely for aesthetic reasons.

On the other side I attached a thin, flat piece of hardboard coated in chalkboard paint (which according to the tin was supposed to also be magnetic, but in reality isn't.)

I re-purposed some of the old corkboards frame to create a neat border around it all, and it was done.

A post shared by Anthony (@darkmidnight_diy) on Nov 3, 2017 at 5:26am PDT