Do-It-Yourself Wood Crate Bookcase

Lindsey from The Pleated Poppy makes ordinary Home Depot crates into a colorful bookcase. #BrightIdeas

Lindsey from The Pleated Poppy takes some ordinary Home Depot crates and transforms them into a colorful and bright bookcase for her kids' school work space. Her ingenuity leads to a flexible storage system that has personality and function.

Recently, Lindsey created a stellar chalkboard wall in a space for her kids to do their school work (Check out the tutorial). It was a space that needed to be super functional, and because of that, she felt like she lost a lot of the "pretty". What it was missing was book storage.

First, she started by ordering these great wood crates from homedepot.com.

While the color of the natural pine is really pretty, she wanted to age the outside of the crates a bit so they would be a nice contrast to the bright colors she was going to be adding. She used a few leftover small pots of Minwax stain in her garage - mostly walnut, mixed in a bit of ebony, and thinned it out a bit with natural.

The process was pretty simple. She only stained the outsides of the crate since she was painting the insides. She also did all the edges with the stain. Lindsey didn't bother staining the under sides (bottoms) of the crate since they would be against the wall and never be seen.

All the colors of paint she used were ones she found in the garage or in her craft paint piles. If you don't have extra paint at home, consider getting paint samples from The Home Depot.

Like any project, this one comes with some mess. And Bounty® was on hand to help clean up the spills. She knew mistakes would happen. She really wanted to be able to see the stained edges of the wood next to the brightly painted interior, so she had to be careful not to paint too heavily at the edges or it would run over. But when she did, she would wet a Bounty® Paper Towel and wipe the excess paint right off!

She needed the boxes to sit both vertically and horizontally to fit the various sizes of her books. Don't you just love the contrast of the bright bookcase against the dark chalkboard wall?

This "crate" shelving is more flexible than fixed shelves, because if she changes her mind, they can be restacked in another configuration. To see Lindsey's full tutorial, check out her blog The Pleated Poppy.