SYTYC Week 1: Clutter Crates

Tutorial for Animal Crate HERE

Tutorial for Rustic and Herringbone Crates HERE

I cleaned out my wood scrap bin to make crates to hold my clutter in three different rooms.  I love these things and we've been getting a lot of use out of them.

All used reclaimed or scrap wood and have drawer pulls for handles.
I don't know about you, but I have piles of junk that we use enough to keep out, but I'd rather have them in a crate to try to look more tidy.

I thought I'd focus on one crate at a time.

MODERN
This ended up being my favorite one.

This box was made with my leftover MDF scraps and had to be pieced together.

I loved the herringbone pattern when it was all done.  Originally I was going to paint a chevron zig-zag, but decided it was so trendy, and tried to switch it a little by doing the herringbone pattern.  It's a variation of the chevron, but you alternate the colors per row instead of solid zig zags.  It ended up working perfectly to seamlessly wrap around the hole box and not break the pattern.
I used left over paint from previous projects.

The crate was free to this point, so I splurged on these bar drawer pulls to use as handles.
I love the modern look the pattern and silver handle give to this crate.

This currently is in our master bedroom and holds all my husbands magazines and reference books that were two large piles on between the bed and his wall.

Crate #2

RUSTIC

This fall my neighbor tore down their fence and she said I could take any wood I wanted before they took it away.  So some fence planks have been rotting in my yard for a few months and I used a few to make this crate.

This crate required other scraps to hold the weather planks together.
I chose to use my 2x2 scraps in the corner, 1x2 strips across the bottom, and I made a divider in the center so I could have two separate compartments.  One for toys, the other for books.

Once again, I think the finish and hardware make the crate.
I used brass handles that I spray painted black, along with the corner braces and casters.  I just thought the shiny silver would look too modern and the oil rubbed bronze made it look more authentic and aged.

This crate goes in our front room.  With our baby still in the sit and play stage, we have toys out every day.  So now all the toys can all fit in the crate, along with all the books in the other half.

At the end of the day I can easily roll the crate on the caster wheels to the mess, load it up and just push the crate out of the way.  I am LOVING this thing!

The last  crate was the most difficult to finish.

CHILDREN

This crate is made from my pine scraps. 

This crate was made with all pine sides.  I had to add 2x2 stubs in the corners to house the casters.

The handles were the cheapest drawer pulls, and were brass.  I just spray painted them white to better match the white hardware. 

To finish the outside, I really wanted to maintain the natural wood grain and knots since I was using actual wood.  But I also wanted it to be colorful as it was for my kid's room.

So I made a wood stain wtih Rit dye and it gave it the color, but is just a stain so you still get the wood grain too.

Using my own had sketched stencils, I gave it natural wood animal silhouettes.  My favorite is the elephant.

This crate holds toys and also has the casters to roll around to make my life easier! 

This crate is in my kid's room to the toys and books.

These crates are all pretty big, so they go on the floor and wouldn't fit on a shelf or anything.