Scavenger Chic

DIY Pallet Crate

• By Joan
• September 25, 2014
• 5 Comments

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On Monday I shared with you my refaced cabinets which I had added a shelf to.  I didn’t want to have just an open shelf.  I  really wanted a crate, preferably old, but my biggest priority was, it just had to fit.  Typical coca-cola crates measure 18 x 12 inches.  My shelf measured 36 x 11 inches.  It wasn’t going to work….even if  they were the right width, one crate would have looked too small in the space and two would have been shoved in.   The only logical thing to do was to make my own.

Since this was a laundry room, I looked up vintage soap ads and eventually settled on Borax soap.  A nice font and a nice clean logo.  It would fit in perfectly in a laundry room.

And for the other box I went with coca-cola, mainly for the red color and its vintage feel.  Googling each of these logos I was able to download an image, enlarge it on my computer and transfer it to my pallet wood.  There are countless ways to transfer an image but I am very old school and use what I have available, which is basically a pencil.   After printing out the image in the exact size I needed, I scribble with a pencil on the back which acts as carbon paper.   I then tape the logo to my wood and trace around the letters.  This transfers the pencil to the wood.   After that I use my paint by number skills and fill in the letters.  To see a few pictures of the process please visit my wood countertop located here.

I don’t have any pictures of these in progress, but the construction of these boxes couldn’t be any more straight forward.  No mitered cuts.

You may be asking yourself at this point,  Joan, why did you do the bottom slats up and down instead of the length of the box?  Well, that is a good question.  If you have ever broken down a pallet you end up with a lot more short pieces of wood than long.  This is an excellent time to use up some of those scraps.

After painting the logo, I sanded it down lightly to look like it was worn.  This is  where using pallet wood comes in most handy, there is nothing left to do with the wood, it already has that aged  kind of grayish patina.

The same was done for the coke crate, but first it got a coat of red paint all over and then the logo was painted on.  Again, the whole thing got a light sanding.

My finished crate measured 27 x 11 inches and fits in perfectly.  The striped paper in the back of the shelf…that is just a couple of pieces of scrapbook paper.  Easy to change if I ever get tired of it.

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