How to Build a Rustic Mail Sorter | Full Tutorial

How to Build your own Rustic Mail Sorter for holiday decor or for all year round!

The Christmas and Holiday posts just keep coming 🙂 I was inspired to make this rustic mail sorter because a) who doesn’t need a cute spot to put holiday cards?

I also always seem to have poplar plywood on hand. It’s my fave. In fact, I’m also using it in this week’s upcoming FurnitureREFRESH. (You can see the October Inspired by Fall post here, and the November Weathered post here). Moving on… here’s how you build this thing. It’s easy, I swear.

Here’s the supply list:

some leftover tongue and groove
a few planks of plywood
black chalk paint
white glaze
carpenter square
measuring tape
mitre saw or circular saw
nail gun
letter stencils

So here are the cuts you’ll need to make. I started with 1×6 tongue and groove scraps.

1 plank cut to 12″ long
2 planks cut to 9″ long

Then cut each of those three pieces along the ‘groove’ of your wood. You’ll end up with two 12″x3.375″ pieces and four 9″x3.375″ pieces. See?

Now build your base for your mail sorter from your plywood. Stand up your 12″ piece and two 9″ pieces to determine the size of your entire sorter. Trace the outline onto your plywood and cut that out. It’ll be approximately 12″x10″ rectangle.

Now, using some scraps of your tongue and groove – cut out three chunky pieces. The length doesn’t really matter, but you want them to be about 1 inch to 3/4″ thick at least. Now, nail those to the top edges of the planks that make up the bottom tray of your mail sorter.

From here, cut another piece of poplar plywood to fit along those ledges you just created. Mine is about 10″ by 7″ give or take. See? You’re building a shelf! Awww….yeah!

Now I pieced it all together and sorta propped it up before assembling. I wanted to give it a bit more dimension that just two rectangles sitting on top of one another. So I gave the ol’ mitre saw a go and added an angle to the outer edges.

I decided to finish my wood before assembly, mainly because I knew it would be easier to stencil letters onto the sides if I could lay them flat. I used a combo of white glaze, natural gel stain and some watered down black paint for good measure.

The last step was to assemble with my nail gun and some wood glue. And then I used some white chalk paint and a 4″ basic letter stencil to add the word MAIL to the front. You can see from the top pic that I was having trouble deciding what colour to do the letters, but I finally settled on white because I think it pops a little bit more. So there you go!