I saw this Vivaterra knife block a long time ago, but couldn’t justify spending $90 on a box of bamboo skewers. As with many things, my first reaction was, “I could make that.” However, I never did.

Fast forward 3 or 4 years: Paula and I are visiting one of my favorite stores, Harbor Freight. It’s one of the bigger ones, and it happens to have a kitchen section. And in that kitchen section….a very familiar (if ugly) knife block for only 13 bucks!

The original is pretty blah looking. The black polypropylene bristles look awful next to the light wood. The block is also in a very traditional style–ok for some, but not quite my taste. On a side note, the bristles were instantly fun to play with as soon as I opened the box.

I brought the block into the woodshop for a few modifications. It actually has a false bottom, which works great for what I had in mind. I began by removing all the cheap hardware bits from the base.

The support leg was just glued on, so I used a small mallet to “coax” it from its home. This really didn’t take much force at all. I was slightly worried about tearing out some of the body wood, but I figured I could just place this side to the wall when I had it finished. The opposite actually happened, and I had to sand off a little hunk of the leg that was left stuck to the body.

I wanted to make my new block completely vertical because the knives tended to stay in the bristles a bit better when it wasn’t tilted, and I wanted to take up less counter space. This is where the false bottom came to the rescue. I simply cut the angled bottom off right below the plastic bottom to make the block stand up 90deg.

I then sanded the freshly cut bottom on the disc sander and ran it around the router table using a 1/8? rounded bit to smooth things out. I used a miter guide on the sander to make sure I didn’t grind it out of square.

The original block had a light varnish on it, so I sanded it until the raw wood was exposed again. I used the power sander to take care of little imperfections and round off the rest of the sharp corners a bit.

A solid bottom works just fine for this box, because the bristles already have their own bottom. Any potential drips would be caught by the plastic tray, so I wasn’t worried about trapped moisture in the wooden box. A simple square piece of wood should do the trick. I measured and cut a piece juuust slightly larger than the hole so it would press-fit into place and not require very much glue. I rounded the corners a bit on the disc sander to make sure the block would slide around on the counter easily.

I only pressed the base in halfway so the block would have a nice floating effect on the counter top.

Since the interior bristles were black and most of my knives are black, I decided to stain the block a very dark ebony. I used Minwax Ebony stain to get the color and a general Ace hardware glossy spar varnish for the shine. I let it dry over the weekend. It ended up a bit rough, so I did a light sanding to smooth it out and applied a second coat.

Once the second coat dried, I filled it up with knives…and it looks great! If you have done anything similar or have any questions, leave a comment below! :)