How To Build a DIY Wine Cork Wall Around a Dartboard {or Not!}

How to make a DIY decorative wine cork wall around a dart board.

We had a TON of wine corks sitting around that I’ve collected for years. I didn’t know exactly what I was going to do with them, but I knew I’d come up with something eventually.

I’ve shared some fun DIY wine cork projects before, but this is by far my favorite. The process for this DIY wine cork wall is very simple, but definitely time consuming!

I laugh when I think about how I purchased a bag of corks online nearly 15 years ago (before my wine-loving days) for a craft project! Now we have plenty. 🙂 I’ve saved them from wine nights, special dinners or fun trips over the years.

I love the look of a cork wall, but then discovered one installed around a dart board and thought that was such a smart way to use up the corks and protect our walls.

Of course this cork project would make for a great accent wall on its own as well!

We’ve had our dart board for YEARS and I just got to hanging it up a few months ago. This was one of my last to-do’s for our basement kitchenette and bar I’ve been working on for the past couple of years.

1. Make your frame on the wall

The dart board was such a pain to hang (I lost the instructions), so I didn’t want to remove it. The middle of the dart board had to be hung at specifically five feet, eight inches off the ground, so I was working around that.

Since I wanted the wine corks to butt up against something, I found a decorative trim that had a thin and thick side.

I made sure the top matched up with the door frame. It’s just more aesthetically pleasing to me:

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If you don’t mind potential damage to your walls in the future, you can move on to step three. I recommend my next step first though.

2. Cover the wall (if desired)

Again, this part would be easier to do without the dart board, but it wasn’t too bad!

I used scrap wood to cover the walls inside the trim. This gave me a surface to glue all of the wine corks to.

It doesn’t need to be perfect at all — you’ll be covering it! But this prevents a lot of potential wall damage if we ever decide to take this down:

I never use glue of any kind on our walls, to prevent drywall damage. I learned my lesson years ago!

After the scrap wood was installed inside the framed area, I painted everything to match the walls (Westchester Gray by Sherwin-Williams):

There are some gaps between the corks when you’re done, so I’m glad I did a few coats of the dark paint.

3. Start applying your corks

It was finally time for the fun (but LOOOOONG) part!

You’ll want to decide on the look of your wine cork wall. At first I was considering a fun design where the corks went both horizontally and vertically. But after applying my first few I knew that would take. literally. forever.

I also thought about installing the wine corks on their ends so you could see the wine color.

But I realized I would need a ton of corks to fill this space if I glued them that way. We had a lot of corks, but not that many.

So in the end, I went with the simplest design I could think of — just installing them vertically across in the frame:

I made sure to check for level every few lines, although it still ended a little wonky at the bottom. I found it was also helpful to eyeball each line, since all of the corks were different sizes and thicknesses.

I found the simplest and quickest way to cut the wine corks was with my handy dandy handheld trim cutter:

This sliced through each cork like buttah (even lengthwise).

This is not a quick project! 😂 It took me an hour or two a day over three days to finish it up. But overall, it was very easy.

I tried to stagger the corks as I went, and used my heavy duty hot glue gun to attach them to the wall. The hot glue has held up beautifully, the corks haven’t budged.

I started from the top with the corks and moved back and forth for each line.

There was an open spot under the dart board I had to fill in, so I cut a few corks lengthwise and glued them in:

It looks pretty seamless. I cut smaller pieces to fill in any empty spots at the end of the rows as well.

I love that we can see some of the wine stained ends:

I absolutely LOVE how this turned out! It was worth the hours of gluing, and gluing…and gluing:

I could have done a square shape, as I don’t see the darts hitting quite that low most of the time. But I like that this makes more of a statement.

This wine cork wall won’t catch every stray dart, but it will help. And it’s such a fun decorative accent in our basement:

It was fun to go through the corks, so many brought back fun memories. I tried to glue each one so the brand or logo was facing out.

Our wine cork wall behind this dart board measures about 30 by 60 inches and I used well over 1,000 wine corks. (!!) Now you know why this took a few days!

I wouldn’t have had nearly enough if I had glued them standing up on the wall — I can’t even imagine how many that would have taken.

If you love this project and don’t have enough corks, you can always buy more wine corks online. I’d err on having more than you think you’ll need just to be safe.

Oh, and our basement bar is finished! I’ll share the bar that I built very soon. So fun!

If I left out any details about this project, please let me know in the comments.

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