DIY Produce Rack

When you have a small kitchen (and by small, I mean teeny tiny) every piece of furniture and every decorative piece that takes up square inches has to serve multiple purposes. There is very little room for “just to look cute” pieces of décor when you live in a 1,074 square foot house.

Originally we had a hanging produce rack that was always stuffed to the brim with produce, partially because it was so small and partially because we love eating fresh fruit and veggies. But after painting our kitchen a beautiful shade of navy blue I’ve been more than reluctant to hang anything back up, and it’s been about two months since we have painted (which means all of our kitchen décor is sitting in a pile in the corner collecting dust because every time I get out the hammer and nails I cringe and change my mind for fear of messing up our paint job).

Anyway, I got sick of having our too small produce rack sitting on our kitchen table taking up space, so when my dad came over the other day to work on some projects I whipped together this produce rack/kitchen storage unit/extra counter space piece. Like I said, small houses mean multi-functional furniture.

To build this produce rack to my size you will need:

• Lots of 2×4 boards
  • Four 36” pieces- for the legs
  • Six 15” pieces- for the length
  • Six 12” pieces- for the width
• 1×6 boards
  • Four pieces cut to 18”long
• A piece of countertop (or pallet for a rustic top- which is what I used)
  • Cut this to your desired size, either lined up exactly to the edge of the piece, or with a bit hanging over
• Nail gun
• Kreg jig and screws
• Paint and/or stain
• Finishing wax

NOTE: I highly recommend ripping off the sides of your wood before starting- this gives the piece a more professional and high end look. The boards we used were framing boards from the lumber section in Lowe’s, so they had rounded edges. To rip the edges, use a table saw to take off about 1/8 of an inch off both sides. This also helps get rid of imperfections on the sides. We did not do that for this project because our table saw currently isn’t working.

To start off with, take all of your 15” and 12” pieces and put two pocket holes into the edges, getting this out of the way helps save time, and you don’t have to keep switching drill bits constantly. Do a quick sanding of each piece before building.

Attach one of the 15” pieces onto one of the legs, laying it flat with the top (to provide a 4” edge for the countertop to sit on)- see the photo below, and then attach another leg to the length piece.

Measure down 12” and attach another 15” piece to the leg (originally we attached the bottom piece first, as you can see above). Sit this piece flush with the outside of the leg. Measure 12” down from the bottom of that piece, and attach another 15” piece.

 

Repeat the above process with the other 15” pieces.

 

Once both sides of the legs are built, it is time to put the legs together! Follow the same steps you did for the 15” pieces when attaching the sets of legs together using the 12” boards.

Once you’re done, your piece will look like this!

Double check that everything is level and all of the screws are in tight, and then flip the produce rack upside down.

Using a nail gun, or hammer and nails if you’re old school, attach two of the 1×6 boards to the bottom of the first shelf (the middle 2×4 pieces). We also used bigger nails and hammered them into the four corners of the shelf. Repeat on the bottom.

 

Flip the produce rack right side up, and attach your pallets to the top using the nail gun.

Fill in the pocket holes- we tried our hardest to keep the pocket holes facing inside so we didn’t have to be the neatest about it, but our drill couldn’t get some of the angles, so some holes were on the outside.

I stained the top with an Ebony stain, wiped it off, and then stained it with Dark Walnut. I used a DecoArt grey paint to paint the body of the produce rack. Of course, I wouldn’t have gotten this done as quickly as I did if I didn’t use my handy dandy HomeRight paint sprayer!

Now we have a nice little produce rack that can function as different things if the need comes. It has some extra counter top space if we need to prep food (if you want direct contact with food, finish the top with a food grade sealer), we can use the rack for storage of random items around the house, and if anything, we could also use this for our pots and pans!

The ironic thing of this is, the weekend I built this we ran out of produce because our potatoes went bad and we ate the rest of our fruit for snacks. Of course that would happen just when I built something to store the tons of produce that we normally have!

A helpful addition to this piece would be teacup hooks on the side for towels, strainers, pans, or even utensils!