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!