Since being in our new home I have been hanging out to make some shelving for all the bits and bobs we have had lying around and I finally got a chance to do a little bit of DIY over the weekend.

I have always loved the look of turning something old into something new and have been adding tons of furniture ideas to my Pinterest boards over the last few months, especially furniture projects made from old crates! So last week I rung around and found a bottle shop selling old beer swap-a-crates for $1.60 each. It was such a good deal so I picked up the crates I needed and stopped and grabbed a few cans of dark brown spray paint on the way home.

The project was so much easier than I thought it would be, the only hard part was actually waiting for paint to dry! I didn’t bother with sanding the crates, I liked the original stamping and nail holes in the wood and they were not meant to look brand new anyway.

Now what I did realise with these particular swap-a-crates is that when you turn them on their sides there is a gap in the crate that runs down the centre, to make it into a flat shelf I just cut a piece of 12mm wood to size to fill the gap so that nothing could fall through when it was being used as a shelf. I just did this with some of the crates so that the top of the bookshelf was a flat surface. I then gave each crate a nice even coat of spray paint and once I had the layout I wanted I screwed them together so all the crates lined up.

I’m really happy with the finished product and all up it cost me about $45 (much cheaper than buying a brand new bookshelf!) Have you made any furnishings out of old crates before or do you think you might give a DIY like this a try?