I made my own farmhouse mini riser

I have seen loads of these cute little farmhouse risers on Pinterest. For some reason you can get them in abundance in the US, but could I find one for sale in the UK? Errmm … no! So, what’s a girl to do? Make your own mini riser of course! Turns out it was so simple and I’ll definitely be making some more for other areas in the house. I mean, I’ve got about 100 trays that are calling out for one! 😉 Here’s how I did it:

What you need to make your own mini riser

Spindles – well that’s what I used for the legs but you could use some old pine wooden knobs and turn them upside down
A saw to cut the spindles
A piece of wood – big enough to create the round top
A Jigsaw
Some sandpaper
Wood glue
Paint or wood stain

how to make your mini riser

We over-estimated how many spindles we would need for our staircase a few years ago (of course!!). And as is pretty standard in our home, naturally we kept them ..you know .. “just in case” .. And today was “in case”. I popped onto the loft and dug out these three spindles. They had the perfect details to make the legs for this mini riser.

Next, I cut the detail off the spindles with a saw. Until they looked like this .. Anyone else think I might be able to do this with corks too? Get saving those bottles peeps!

Next, I grabbed a bit of scrap wood and a cereal bowl (you know .. the really high tech stuff!! 🙂 ). Draw a circle around the bowl and cut to size with a jigsaw. It’s probably not perfectly circular, but you know what .. rustic effect and all that!! It did the trick.

Sand down the circle and smooth the edges. I used a sander but with a bit of elbow grease you can do this with a piece of sandpaper too.

Anyone else thinks this looks like a blini?

Give the legs a bit of sanding too, just to get rid of any rough edges. Check they are all the same height and sand down the ends if needed.

Turn the circular piece of wood upside down and add some wood glue to each of the legs. Press into place and leave to set. I didn’t do anything to it, but if you want to you can place a heavier object on top of it until it sets.

Once it’s fully tried, stain or paint your mini riser with your favourite paint. My go to paint was the one we’ve used in our kitchen so I knew it would match our colour scheme. It’s a Valspar wood paint but it has a lovely finish and I used it loads for signs and other woodwork projects.

the result

Leave it to dry and give it another coat of paint if needed. And that’s it!! I was really pleasantly surprised by how easy it was to make my own mini riser!

Just how cute does this look in our kitchen? It’s just a perfect little stand to be able to switch up the little sign in our little coffee area depending on the season.