Building a donut board

My wife recently planned a bridal shower (my brother is getting married!) and really did an excellent job. I was not that involved overall but was tasked with building something, in this case a donut board.

The finished and fully loaded final product

I first had to ask, 'A what?' Unbeknownst to me these upright boards, or walls, with a grid of pegs for displaying donuts, or bagels or pretzels, are all the rage right now for parties. If you do it right it can look pretty cool I guess.

After putting it off until close to our son's spring break, my time to work, I started to figure out how it needed to look. I got it from my wife it would ideally sit on a table, stand up by itself and hold about 40 donuts. Okay. I drew up some potential layouts on engineering paper. Afterward I jokingly noted that these just looked like a bunch of boobs (dots for the peg locations, circles for the donuts...), but I did get what I needed. The first designs included 40 individual pegs and stood 4' high, which I thought could be too tall atop a table. The second iteration designs limited it to 20 pegs, with the idea to double up the donuts. Now the total size would be about a 3' square, seemingly ideal.

Now, how to build this? There are a bunch of articles on how people built their own donut boards, and a bunch of them were simply dowels glued onto a sheet of plywood. I didn't like that idea one bit, there's no way that would hold well. Finding a better template, from this blog post, helped me proceed. I'd get a four foot square piece of plywood, cut it down, drill a grid of 3/8" holes and glue 3/8" dowels into those. A solid start.

I acquired my piece of plywood and dowels from Menards (usually cheaper than Home Depot). With a generous 6" per peg, I'd need three 48" dowels to get at least 20. After making the purchases I realized the plywood wouldn't fit in my wife's car, which I had that day. She came to help, with the kids in tow, in my car. It was a fun morning.

Making the functional and core part of the board was straightforward. We have a table saw in our garage so I cut down the 4' square to a 3' square. I laid out the grid of hole locations, a pretty simple one with 4 rows of 5 and 6" spacing, and drilled a half inch down so not to punch through the back. Some sanding was needed. Then I had to paint and seal it, with food touching the surface that was a consideration. I didn't want to buy paint or anything else if I could help it so used exterior white paint and polyurethane we already had (from the deck and sandbox). The fact that they were exterior only meant it'd be extra durable and take a little longer to dry/cure. Fortunately I had plenty of time. With a couple coats of the white paint and clear poly the main board was ready to go.

Next up were the pegs. I rubber banded the three dowels together (also taken from the blog post linked above) and cut them to a little less than 6", 5.5" I think, with our miter saw. When the dowels got short this was a challenge and two of the last three broke with the last cut, but I still ended up with 22, more than needed. Each of these little pieces needed to be sanded, painted and sealed. I built, if you can call it that, a little drying rack of sorts and did this in several stages as I could never paint the whole stick and hold it at the same time. This was tedious but not too bad. When they all looked good enough my son and I twisted the pegs into the holes in the main board. I used a square to get them as close to 90 degrees as possible and visually adjusted a few so the rows and columns looked aligned.

There also needed to be a sign at the top to complete the visual appearance. I thought it would look great to have this stick out, protrude, from the main board. A few more purchases were needed, a 3' 1x6 board, some decorative 4" stencils and a can of light purple (French Lilac) spray paint, the color of the wedding and shower. The board was cut down to 2' and painted white, no poly this time. Then I taped together the stencils to spell out D-O-N-U-T-S, laid them down in the center of the board and spray painted. I should've closed up the gaps between the letters, ah well, but a few layers of some white primer covered up the resulting purple lines to my satisfaction. After screwing on the signage board I started to get proud.

The last task was to make it stand up on its own. I went scrounging at Home Depot, knowing they often have a discount lumber cart, and this worked out. I pulled a couple full 8' 2x3s, and a couple other useful pieces, out of the pile and got them 70% off. (Buying wood for projects can be quite expensive and I think I'm getting better at finding ways to cut that cost.) For the first time in a long time I had to think about angles and eventually put together two triangles, secured them to the front, and had a donut board that successfully stood up on its own, just slightly leaning backward. Plus they weren't that big and didn't add much weight.

In all I find it fun to do little projects like this because it involves some skill, working with your hands and problem solving. Plus it got to be a fun piece of what was a big shower and a way to show off a little for my wife. I'm glad she asked.