The Yellow Fern: Crate Shelves

As with any new house, we have a blank canvas to work with. We have a fireplace in our kitchen, so I wanted to create a reading nook. In the previous post, we made the stump table to go next to the comfy overstuffed chair in the kitchen and the nook was started! I wanted a book shelf for the empty wall on the right side and I love this look:

To buy these shelves made are really expensive and I saw similar posts on other blogs where they made them out of crates premade from JoAnns. This too is expensive b/c the crates are $12 a pop, cheap balsa-type wood, poorly made and small. So it's a lot of money for not good quality.

So what do the hubs and I decide? Make them ourselves from old wood, of course! We went on a search for palettes for a couple of weeks and found these baby's!

A whole truck load of palettes! Jack pot! They were well worn and had lots of nails. We took them all apart and took the nails out. They left behind rusty nail holes which gave the wood a neat rustic look. So now we have a pile of long pieces of wood.

We made the crates two different sizes so they would stack evenly and we would be able to mix match some vertical and some horizontal. Instead of all the crates being horizontal like the picture above. Ryan figured up a cut list and started cutting away...

As he was cutting, I started staining. We chose Kona by Minwax. It was A LOT of wood to stain.

The only wood we had to buy was for the ends of the crates. We bought three 1x12's. And here's all the wood laying out to dry after staining and one crate made.