Homemade Gift for Men: Hot Sauce Bar

The following is a post from contributing writer Jami.

Sometimes finding appropriate gifts for the men in your life is difficult, and being able to make a gift for men? Well, that’s downright hard. There just aren’t a lot of easy, inexpensive, DIY things men would enjoy.

I’ve got a homemade gift for men idea that meets all these criteria, and it’s just plain fun: a collection of hot sauces presented in a simple, scrap wood box complete with a personalized label. They get to sample various flavors and heat indexes, and you get to come off as brilliant. It’s a win-win.

Homemade Gift for Men: Hot Sauce Bar

Supplies Needed

• Scrap wood (our example used about 32 inches of 1×3’s for sides and 30 inches of 1×2’s for bottom)
• Hand saw or miter saw
• Nails & hammer or nail gun (or even drill and screwdriver for screws)
• Sand paper
• Two metal handles (preferably reused) and screws to attach
• Two upholstery tacks or thumb tacks to coordinate with handles
• 4-6 varieties of hot sauces
• shredded paper (I shredded brown kraft paper in our office shredder- newspaper would be good, too)

Instructions:

1. To make the rustic box, cut the scrap 1×3’s into two 10-inch long sides and two 6-inch ends. This is rustic, so you can decide to have your ends longer than the sides, like the example, or shorter and have the sides go the whole way across. It’s up to you.
2. Nail or screw the shorter end pieces to the sides, being careful to keep everything as square as possible.
3. Cut bottom piece (s) to fit – either three 1×2’s like the example, or a solid scrap piece of plywood, and attach to sides.
4. Sand all edges to get rid of splinters and roughness.
5. Attach handles to each side.
6. Print out a label (use the example pictured or create your own) on heavy-weight paper and cut to fit one long side.
7. Attach label with upholstery/thumb tacks.
8. Fill the box with shredded paper and four to six different hot sauces.

For the sauces, choose varying degrees of hotness and also ethnicity–Asian, Hispanic, Cajun, etc. for a fun variety. Don’t forget to look at places like the dollar store and World Market  for different, inexpensive sauces.

We’ve given a few of our relatives this unique gift and they’ve always been a big hit. So much so that they will tell us later all the different things they used the hot sauces for and which they liked best. It’s like a gift that keeps on giving.

What gifts have you found that men enjoy?

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