Rustic Decor: DIY Wood Crate Shelves

Turning apparently useless and ugly objects into pretty adornments for your house is something that only requires a clever eye and imagination, and you can create plenty of rustic decorative objects for your house with few efforts and some eye-popping results. We are creating guides according to decor themes and today you will learn how to create DIY wood crate shelves, ready to be used anywhere in your house where you feel it does fit nice, from the kitchen to your laundry, garden or balcony, these shelves are very old fashioned and can display anything you believe worth of showing out instead of storing behind doors in your cabinets. Let’s see how to craft them!

Walls: Wood Crate Shelf

Wood crates are often reused for many different outdoors functionalities, specially to create cute plant pots with almost no effort but to fill it in with dirt. Their very rustic and worn out appearance though can make great furniture inside your house. Turn it around and hang on the walls and you have great shelves with a very sweet countryside touch.

To create your wood crate shelves you will need a set of them and some extra tools to make it a safe object to hang on and of course, beautiful to display.

Materials:

Wood crate
Sandpaper
Rasp
Varnish
4 or more screw hooks
Screwdriver
Drill
4 ore more square shouldered hook screws (L shaped screws)

Instructions:

To get started, of course, you have to pick wood crates that not only look good to your taste but also look in good shape, enough to bear the objects you have in mind for them. There are many different wood crate builds, some with harder, thicker wood slats, others with lighter wood slats, the recommendation is always to stick to stronger ones so you can make use of them for anything you need.
Once you have choose the crate, you basically have to polish it so you can have a beautiful piece of furniture to hang on your walls. We are going to stick to the varnish solution here, but you can as well paint the crates as you wish with any kind of wood paint. The varnish keeps the woody outlook which is what we are aiming for here.
Before we paint it, we have to make the surface ready for this finish layer. Use the rasp to shape stronger polishes, like creating curvy lines on the outer edges or to fix broken edges. Otherwise you can just make use of the sandpaper to make the surface smooth.
With the help of the screwdriver, you will carve four holes or more to attach the screw hooks. They will be used to hang cups and anything you wish, so you can as well purchase these hooks with the look that pleases you more and fits better the style of the crate. Some screw hooks do not even need the help of the screwdriver, since we are dealing with wood, you can just screw them into the wood slat. – Once you are finished polishing, clean it up with a dry cloth, just to remove debris from all the sanding.
Now you are ready to finish the crate with varnish or paint. Use a brush big enough to cover the crate surface faster, and of course, one that is adequate for varnish and wood. You will easily find the match for varnish or paint while you are purchasing them, otherwise you can take a look on this guide
Let the crate sit and dry out. Once it is completely dry, you are ready to hang it around on your walls!
If you do not have yet proper hooks on your hall to hang them, use the drill to attach the L shaped screw hooks we mentioned in the list of materials. However, be sure to purchase heavy duty hooks of this kind, specially if the crate is heavy and if you wish to display tableware.

Be aware that this is a hack for an horizontal display. Nothing is stopping you from hanging the crate vertically though, so you can create clever and beautiful puzzles of crates to display different objects in different positioned crates. Attaching some extra wood slats inside the crate, with screws or glue, and you can create different inner sections.