Make Your Own Dinner Planner Menu Board!

Tired of forgetting what meals you like? Bored of planning meals ahead of time? Well, stand back and hold onto your socks! It's time to make planning your week's meals more of a doddle with a spot of rustic DIY!

Find out how to upcycle an old cupboard door and a few pieces of scrap wood into a swanky new dinner planner menu board!

You'll need these bits and bobs:

Tools

• Saw (for cutting wood to size)
• Scissors (for trimming fabric for backing the board)
• Tin of spray adhesive (although very tacky glue would work just as well)
• Hammer
• Screwdriver
• Hot glue gun & glue sticks

Materials

• Old cupboard/cabinet door (or sheet of wood)
• Scrap pieces of wood (around an inch or so thick)
• Backing material (I used squares of jute)
• Black card for menu choices
• White paper to print menu choices
• Sticky cork lettering
• Small pegs with wood shapes on them (or you can glue your own shapes onto normal pegs!)
• 10mm screws (optional, but handy)

First off, sketch out where each of your menu board areas will be!

I went for 7 spaces for each day of the week, a space for an open box for holding menu cards and a space for a notepad (help prepare you for that next shop!)

Measure how wide and high you want the menu board to be and use the saw to cut it to size.

If you're using squares of material, spray enough adhesive to stick each square down, overlapping them a bit (with around an inch or 2 overhanging the edge of the board).

If you overlap each square a bit, it'll help cover up the original piece of board.

To tidy up the back, flip the board over and cut a square off each corner to help wrapping around. Next, spray adhesive along each edge, wrapping the overlapping bit of material around it and onto the back. Hold it in place for 10 seconds or so and then smooth it down.

Repeat for all the edges until the material's all smoothed down!

Next up, cut pieces of scrap wood to make your box.

If you use the same piece of scrapwood, it'll make things easier! I cut the following lengths:

• 12cm x 6cm (1 piece) for the edges
• 1 x 6cm (1 pieces) for the sides
• 1 x 2cm (1 piece) to fit underneath the box

You can either drill and screw the box together or I found hot glue held the box together nice and strongly!

Now, how you do this step is entirely up to you decoration-wise!

If you bought pegs with boards attached, you can just stick the cork lettering onto the pegs - making sure you check which way round the pegs are going to open!

if you just bought pegs, then you can cut some scrap pieces to shapes or pick up some round pieces of MDF to glue to each peg!

Now, make your cards (I went with 12cm wide and 3cm high) with paper inserts (just typed out and printed). if you clip a menu card into each peg, you can space them out on the board where you want them and know you've got enough space for them!

Line them up where you'd like them and then hot glue them in place one at a time to help keep them aligned.

Now, with your notepad, you're going to eventually run out of sheets of paper and you don't want glue stuck on your lovely menu board!

So, find yourself a notepad with a decent thick backing and flip it open to the back page. Pilot some holes in each corner of the notepad through into the board and then screw down the notepad flush to the board.

Countersunk screws work nicely for this step :)

Next up, lLine up the menu card box on the board and use a pencil to draw around the outline of the box.

For a quick (but strong) fix, you can run a line of hot glue just in from the pencil line and press the box back in place.

Alternatively, you could drill 3 holes (one for each side of the box) and then screw in from the back of the board to hold the box in place. I went for hot glue, which holds very sturdily!

Then, for decoration, I cut a piece of card the size of the front of the box, rounded the edges with scissors and stuck the letters M e a l s on top. Fix in place with a tacky glue stick or a dab or 4 of hot glue.

Just as the title suggests, cut a piece of card that fits that last space on the board, round the edges and lay out the letters (before sticking).

Once they're just where you want them, stick them down one by one to help keep them aligned.

You can also use a ruler to help line them.

Flip the board over and drill holes for 2 picture hooks (I found the flat ones with a zig-zag edge worked well as they were quite low-profile). Screw them down using small screws (no longer than the thickness of your board).

I used 10mm screws and they worked out pretty well.

Measure the distance between the centre of each picture hook and use a ruler measure that distance on the wall where you want the board to hang.

Another way you can do this is to find the centre of the space where you want the board to hang and then measure half the distance between the picture hooks either side of the mark on the wall. This way, your board will hang centrally on the wall!

Tap in a few flat-headed tacks leaving around 4mm showing and you're done!

Gently slot your menu board over the tacks and get planning for those meals!

Thanks for checking out the instructable and be sure to post any photos of menu planners you try yourself!