DIY Rustic Wood Art Frames

Hello Remodelaholics!  I am Tasha and I blog over at Designer Trapped in a Lawyer’s Body.  You may remember my first contributor post about how to transform an outdated, cultured marble vanity with concrete and my post about how we built a beautiful wood screen to hide ugly utility boxes on the exterior of our house.  Well, I am back again this month to teach you how to make your own DIY rustic wood art frames.  They are easy to make and are stunning!

My blog focuses on thrifty DIY projects, easy crafts and happy household tips.  I don’t know about you, but I find that art can be expensive and that framing it can be prohibitively expensive.  Fortunately, there are a lot of affordable DIY options for creating and framing art work, like these 6 easy art projects and these 50 affordable ways to display art prints and photos.

When it came time to select art work for our dining room makeover, we knew we would have to frame the art ourselves to keep the costs down. We tore down this old, cedar privacy screen from our back deck a while back, which has provided us with a ton of free wood!  So, we grabbed our free wood and got to work. Read on to learn how to make your own rustic wood art frames!

How to Make Easy Rustic Wood Art Frames

Materials and Tools Needed:

• Reclaimed wood.  We used our old fence, but you could certainly use pallet wood or any other reclaimed wood that you can get your hands on.  The older, the better, in my opinion.  I pressure washed the wood I used to remove most, but not all of the paint because I liked the look of the chipped paint in places.
• Miter saw
• Carpenter square
• Flat corner braces.  We purchased ours at Home Depot.
• Photo hanging hardware
• Spray paint (if you want to change the color of your brackets)
• Screw driver or drill driver

Tutorial

1) Measure the art you are planning to frame.  The inner edge of your frame will need to be smaller than the art so that the art can sit behind the frame and there will be some wood to attach it to.  To accomplish this, cut four lengths of wood so that the inside edge of your mitered board is about 1-inch shorter than the dimensions of the art.  For example, if you are framing a 16 x 20 piece of art, you will want your to miter cut your wood 15 inches and 19 inches long on the inside edge.   See the diagram below.  Write down the dimensions that your frame needs to be cut to.

2)  Mark your cuts with your carpenter square.  Then cut your wood, making sure to set the angle of your miter saw at 45 degrees. It is VITAL that both long pieces are exactly the same length and that both shorter pieces are exactly the same length. This will ensure that your mitered corners line up perfectly. The best way to do this is to saw through both long pieces at the same time with your miter saw.  Then saw through both short pieces at the same time with your miter saw.

3)  Paint your flat corner braces, if you wish.  I chose to paint our braces black, but I wanted to keep the screws silver for some additional interest.

4) Lay out all your pieces to create your frame.  Secure the pieces together using the flat corner braces.

5)  Attach photo hanging hardware.

6) Insert your artwork and you are done!  I mounted the print that we purchased to a piece of foam core that we cut to size and attached it to the frame using small nails.

How easy is that?!  And because we used reclaimed wood that we already had on hand, the only cost to us was the hardware.  So for $5.00 we have a frame that we love more than anything we could have ever purchased in a store!  Check out the finished project.  I LOVE the rustic wood and industrial hardware.  What do you think?

I would love for you to head over to my blog to check out our thrifty dining room makeover–the room where this beautiful framed print is hanging!  While you are there, be sure to explore some of our other renovation projects, like DIY herringbone plank wall out of the same old fence that we used for this frame FOR FREE or how we created a DIY herringbone plank wall out of the same old fence that we used for this frame FOR FREE!  I hope to see you over in my corner of blog land soon!

     If you want to save this project to refer back to later, I would love for you to pin it and share it on Facebook!

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More easy DIY picture frames:

click for full tutorials