I made it using mostly modifiers.. I'm Max user, so i dunno if u have these in Maya but these are the steps i used:

first box, or cilinder as base, then move the vertices a little bit so it gets some randomnes.. Then i add few tesselate and noise modifers to get 3 steps of noise: large scale noise to make it even more randomshaped, one large noise to make groups of wooden pieces look diferent, and one to make it look like wood, fine rougnes... that's about it...