Do you have unused wooden crates lying around at home? Don’t know what to do with them? They can be turned into home decor and furniture, say hobbyists.
A basic sense of polishing wood and painting will help. Materials needed: wooden crates, acrylic and metallic paints, brushes, hammer, nails, cutter, varnish, ropes and sandpaper.
Low tables
Wooden crates, which are mostly brown, can be repainted and turned into low tables. Ridhika Khetri, an interior designer and sustainability advocate from Mumbai, who likes making furniture from waste, uses crates to make tables.
Trim and sand the crates with sandpaper to smoothen the surface. Make sure the crates are stable, can be turned upside down, so it provides a flat surface to keep things.
“You can use one or two of them together. Paint over the surface of the crates with white or off-white acrylic colours,” she says.
After it dries, you can use varnish to seal the paint, she adds.
Shelves
Ensure that planks on the crate are in place and hammer down ones where the nails are off and out of place. Once the crates are safe for usage, they can be mounted on a wall. “One can also place them on the floor or on top of each other, so as to look like a line of shelves. You can add vertical planks inside the crates to create compartments,” says Ridhika.
Entire wall
In a pastel or white-coloured room, a wall made of wooden crates as an enormous bookshelf, would look classy.
Just make sure you design the structure in a way that there are crates placed vertically and horizontally — this will make the design attractive, notes Akarsh Mehta, a craft hobbyist from Bengaluru. Hammer nails into crates, so as to place them together, and use super glue or epoxy to fix them together.
“To make the crate wall look interesting, place soft toys and showpieces in between, apart from books and important items,” he says.
Hanging storage
After cleaning and sanding the crates out, and ensuring planks on them are in shape, paint them a dark colour. “Pass ropes through the gaps, and tie them together into a top knot. Add more crates to make a hanging shelf. Hang this from a hook on the ceiling so as to keep things accessible near a study table or even the kitchen,” says Akarsh.
Planters
The easiest and most playful use of crates can be as planters in your kitchen, balcony or terrace garden. Just remove the shards, and decorate them with paints, and layer them with stones and gardening soil. “You could also place potted plants into the crates directly,” says Ridhika.