Shelf Upgrade: Faux Crates

Welcome to the pre-reveal-Jodie’s-bedroom-projects-athon! Today I wanted to address the elephant in my room, the bookcase overflowing with clothes.

I know, embarrassing.

As you can see on the bottom, I’ve tried purchasing baskets to help this messy situation, but it’s so hard/expensive to find multiple baskets of the same size that fit the shelves perfectly, so I came up with a different solution- faux crates! Note: If you’re here from Pinterest- I’ve just added new photos. This is the same project!

Making them was very simple and very inexpensive. We started with a trip to The Home Depot (we’re now regulars and have friends there and I’m so not upset about that) to purchase two 1×4 boards for just over $2 each. We had measured the width of our bookcase and subtracted about 1/4″ (we will explain later) and had the boards cut at the store. Since we needed two boards per shelf, and had three shelves, we ended up with six pieces at 24 1/2″ long.

After we sanded them down to be nice and smooth, we stained and poly’d the wood our favorite Minwax’s Espresso. We used one coat and wiped it off after about a minute to get a lighter tone.

While that was drying, we worked on the next step. We took white spray paint to contractor shims to use as the vertical part of the crate to keep the horizontal (the stained wood above) together. Two per crate were needed for a total of six shims.

After they were dry, we cut them down to our desired length of 7 1/2″ and nailed the pieces together using small 3/4″ brad nails.

We wanted to add some hardware to finish the crate look, so simply marked off our hardware, drilled a few holes, and attached the pulls.

Now, remember how we cut the boards to 1/4″ less than the width of our shelf? That’s to accommodate the vinyl bumpers we added to the sides of our crate front to wedge it into the sides of the bookcase and keep it in place. We purchased self adhesive stickers, so adding them was the simplest step!

After it’s all put together, we put them into place and put my clothes back onto the shelves!

Here’s a breakdown of the costs for anyone interested:

Two 1×4’s: $2.06 ea
Stain and Poly: Already had on hand, but around $5 ea for the small size, plus you’ll have extra to use for another project!
Spray Paint: Already had on hand, but ranges from $2-$7 depending on what you pick
Nails: Already had on hand, but can purchase for less than $2
Hardware: $4.97 ea
Vinyl Bumpers: $3.97

Total: $23 for $6.97 per crate (factor in any extra costs for paint/stain/poly/nails if you’re starting from scratch of course)