Not every vinyl project needs to be a full media console or a big storage crate. Some of the most useful pieces in the shop are the small ones: a stand to prop up a favorite album, a simple frame to turn a cover into wall art, or a little holder that keeps one record upright and visible. This post covers three of those small builds, all made from leftover shop material rather than a fresh trip to the lumberyard.
If you’re looking to store a whole collection instead, the mitered vinyl record storage crate or the record player stand with built-in vinyl storage are better starting points. This post is about the smaller stuff: single-record holders and wall display.
1. A Framed Album Cover for the Wall
The simplest of the three builds is also the one with the biggest visual payoff: a plain mitered wood frame sized to a standard record jacket, with the album mounted inside, shrink wrap and all. Leaving the factory shrink wrap on doubles as a bit of built-in protection for the cover art, and it means there’s no cutting, matting, or gluing the sleeve itself. The frame just holds it in place.
The frame itself is basic mitered molding, joined at the corners and backed with a thin panel to hold the album flat inside the opening. It’s a straightforward build for anyone comfortable with a miter saw and glue, the kind of project that uses up scrap molding or thin stock that’s too small for anything else.
Hung on the wall, it reads as real art rather than a garage project. It’s proof that a favorite album cover can carry a wall on its own with almost no additional embellishment.
2. A Handle-Cut Record Holder From OSB Scrap
The second build is a small, boxy holder with a rough OSB front panel, the kind of oriented-strand-board offcut most shops have lying around after a bigger project. Rather than hide the material, the OSB texture is left exposed as the face of the piece, with a routed hand-hold cut into it so the whole holder can be picked up and carried like a small crate.
Construction is simple glue-and-clamp work: the OSB panel and its mitered wood edging are assembled flat and left to cure under clamps before the handle cutout and final trim go in.
The result stands a record upright wherever you set it down (next to a turntable, on a shelf, on a console top) while doubling as a way to use up an OSB offcut that would otherwise go in the scrap bin.
3. A Simple Kerf-Cut Record Stand
The smallest and quickest build of the three is a little two-piece wood block with a thin slot cut across the top, essentially a miniature easel for a single album. A single pass with a saw blade, cutting partway into a joined block, is enough to create a slot that a record jacket can stand in.
It’s about as low-effort as woodworking projects get, but it’s also the most versatile of the three: small enough to move between a workbench, a shelf, or a desk, wherever you want to prop up whatever you’re currently spinning.
Why Small Scrap-Wood Builds Are Worth Doing
None of these three pieces needs a cut list, a lumber run, or much shop time. They’re a good use for the odds and ends every shop accumulates (a scrap of OSB, a leftover length of molding, a block too small for anything bigger) and they turn a stack of records into something worth looking at instead of something stored out of sight. Vinyl’s resurgence has made this kind of small display project more relevant than ever: U.S. vinyl sales passed $1 billion in 2025 for the first time, according to the RIAA’s year-end report, plenty of reason to give a favorite record a proper place on the wall or the shelf instead of leaving it in a stack.
For a piece meant to hold an entire collection rather than one or two favorites, see the mitered vinyl record storage crate or the record player stand with built-in vinyl storage.