If you live in an upstairs apartment, you know that it is difficult to make a carpentry workshop. Although I would like to work more with wood, I can't because I don't have a place to set up a workshop. The truth is that I am still an amateur, I have few projects that require carpentry skills so I did not buy many and expensive tools, I always ask for the help of a craftsmen. However, in this article I would like to show how you could make a special looking piece of wooden decor, very cheap and only with a few tools.

The idea for this wall art came to me by looking on etsy.com, if you do a search for ‘wooden wall art’ you will see what I am talking about. I was also inspired by some canvases that show photos of cubes of different heights painted in different colors. But I want you to pay attention to one thing: look at the prices! Ouch! They are not exactly low.

So let's see how to make something beautiful and inexpensive with our hands :)

Step 1: Materials and Tools

Necessary materials:

The support on which I glued the cubes. I used a piece of natural MDF of 450x450mm and a thickness of 4mm that I had left from another project;
Wooden cubes of 30x30x30mm. I used about 105 cubes which I cut as follows : about 35 pieces in three and 50 pieces in two parts, and 20 uncut cubes so the result was about 225 pieces that will be used to cover the whole piece of MDF.
Colored stain. I ordered seven colors, rainbow colors, ready mixed, like these for example, but there are a lot of videos on youtube where you can see how to make colorful stain by mixing different paints with normal stain;
Wood adhesive. I used a special adhesive for wood, of good quality, I don't want my wall decor to fall apart after a while :)
Kit for hanging picture frames, of course it depends on what weight the final product has, I used a piece of wood cube like the ones I used for the wall art and a screw hook as in the photo above.

Tools:

As I said, I oriented myself so as to use as few tools as possible in carrying out this project, so I ordered online a cheap set of mitre box with a back saw, so that I could make the cuttings and some clamps to help fix the cubes in the mitre box. I also used things I had in the house anyway: sandpaper, brushes.

Step 2: The Making Process

The hardest and most time consuming part is to cut the cubes. You may be wondering why this operation was so necessary. The truth is that there are several possibilities for making this decor that we can think of. For example, you could cut the cubes only in half, but then of course a larger number of cubes is needed. Or you could use cubes of different sizes, for example 15x15x15mm and 30x30x30mm, more cubes are needed but no need for cutting and the wall decor could look like in the image below (with random cube and color arrangement).

However, minimizing the expenses means increasing the physical effort :)

So I started cutting the cubes. I didn't put too much emphasis on respecting dimensions or right angles, I really liked this random look after cutting, but instead I was careful to cut it along the wood fibers so that the surface of the cube that would be visible had a texture as beautiful as possible.

Then I proceeded to sand the surfaces that would be covered with colored stain. I paid special attention to the surface that would be visible, as I told you I wanted the wood pattern to be as visible as possible.

I divided the resulting pieces into seven groups and painted them with the seven colors of the rainbow. If necessary I would have painted in several layers but to my joy even after the first layer the colors were gorgeous.

However, I had a small problem with the orange. The color I wanted to use does not look very orange but rather brown.

So I mixed yellow with a little red and it turned out a very nice color.

I arranged then the colored pieces next to each other according to the model I wanted.

I then started to place and glue the pieces to the support (My niece helped me to color and glue the pieces of wood ?).

You can watch all these operations in the video below.

You can also take note how I fixed the wood piece with the screw hook to the MDF support.

Step 3: In the End

At the beginning of the article I inserted some links about the materials and tools that can be used but I ordered them online, in my country, from other online stores, and you can order at much better prices in your country too. However, to give you an idea, I present my price list below:

Wooden cubes 105 pcs - $25
MDF board 1pc - $4.3
Colored stain, set of 7 colors - $10
Wood glue - $3.5
Saw set + box - $10

A total of $53, not too bad 😊.

There is not much to be added, I think that my wall decor came out excellent and I am very satisfied with the end result, it was definitely worth the effort.

I hope you like it too and you will take over and further develop my idea. As always, I look forward to your questions and opinions.