myalteredstate.co/diy-stack...ge-crates/

 

Do you know what kind of project feels good after you have finished one that stretched and strained your creative boundaries?

An easy one.

A project that you know like the back of your hand.

One you can do blindfolded.

Good old-fashioned storage crates.

Going back to my Etsy crate-building roots felt familiar.

Sort of like the feeling I get when I pick up a random softball or baseball bat and I automatically want to tap each foot, square my hips, and set my grip in a seamless stream of motion.

I get swept up in the momentum of muscle memory.

For this pair of storage crates, I wanted to find wood that can be easily found at a hardware store.

What I came up with was this:

Three 1 inch thick boards, 45 inches long  (2 of them were 5.5 in wide, 1 was 4 in wide.)

** NOTE: The amount of lumber shown makes two crates, but for the love of Pete, I will only show the painting and building of one.  The are made identically to one another.

I used a calculator (it still hurts my head to talk math, even with a calculator) to figure out the length of cuts I needed to make.

I needed 4 sections from each board.

(I’m just going to mention those pieces above make two crates.)

I started piecing it together…

and then here’s the 4 in wide sides added  (nothing’s put together yet in these two photos, I was just checking to make sure measurements met up…)

(Just a reminder, there are two crates, but I’m only showing crate A…)

Some people like to paint after the put-together part, but I like to paint it while it’s flat.  After I made sure the crate would look like a crate, I laid the pieces flat and got out my overly-large stencils.

When I got to this part, I kind of started flying by the seat of my pants.  (Totally normal.  50/50 chance it will turn out ok.)

When I stencil half-hazard like this, I use cans of spray paint that are are running on fumes- 0ut of gas.

(Because I am a non-waster of things, not time.  Apparently, I’m ok wasting time.)

After I polished off the last drops from a couple cans, I let it dry and rolled white paint over it.  Wha.?

(Don’t ask.  I just wanted some wordage to show through after I got to the part where I distress the paint. Not really important what it spelled out…)

I wasn’t really worried about coverage because I was going to be taking a lot of the paint off.

But now that I look at the picture below, it looks like I covered it well anyway.  (Seat of my pants.)

Then I did some scraping. Technique found here .

Then when it dried, I did some sanding because I like to double my efforts and waste time.  Really though, I wasn’t impressed with the scraping results.

ta-da.

Next it was time to put it together.

I used old-school nails, so that meant drilling pilot holes to avoid splitting-of-the-wood syndrome.

(If I had used a finish nailer, putting the crate together would have been a lot faster. No pilot holes needed. But as I said, I like to waste time.)

And glue.  Don’t forget the wood glue. (Gorilla Glue wood glue.)

Then I drove the nails in with a hammer.

Then I flipped it over, pre-drilled, and drove a couple nails on bottom.

Done and done.  (Except I made crate B next, then I was done.) 

I would love to see how yours turn out!