DIY Easy One Hour Rustic Crate

Hello Crafting Chicks Readers! My name is Amanda and my husband and I blog over at The Contractor Chronicles. We bought a home seven years ago and have started telling our story about our home remodel and sharing our love of tools.

We believe that anyone can use tools and build beautiful things for their homes. We like to share big home projects as well as sharing small projects that you can do in a hour – with the right tools!

Today I am sharing how to build an easy 1-hour rustic crate. This project is a great project if you are just learning to build or learning to use tools.

Materials Needed:
1 1×4
1 1×10
Gorilla Glue
1” staples (or nails)
Paint/Stain
Handles

Tools Needed:
Miter Box
Staple Gun or Hammer
Tape Measure

Use your miter box and cut the 1×10 for your bottom and your ends. The length of the bottom is 16” and the ends are 9”. You can make them bigger or smaller if you would like to – the great thing about DIY is that you can make it how you want too!

Use your 1×4 and cut your sides to be the same length as your bottom piece – so I cut mine to be 16”. You will need four pieces for your sides.

Set up your ends to be about the same width apart as your bottom piece and add your gorilla wood glue to one end. Only apply the glue to one end so you don’t smear it on the other end.

Staple the glued end on.

Glue the other end and then staple it on as well. So you now have a “U” shape – like a bridge.

Now that the bottom and end pieces are glued and stapled you will lay the bottom and end pieces on their side and glue and staple the side pieces on. To do this – you need to apply glue to both ends of the bottom side piece.

You also want to glue the entire bottom side too – then line up the side with the bottom and staple it onto the end pieces.

Go up a couple inches and glue and staple the ends on the top side piece too.

Flip it over and glue and staple the side pieces to the other side as well. You can see that I left about an inch on the top and I love it like that but you can go to the top if you don’t. I like the character it adds.

Now we are into the project about 10 minutes! Sweet right? Now let’s paint it or stain it! I chose to paint this one!

I used DecoArt Chalk Paint and gave it a coat of Yesteryear. I love this color – it is blueish gray and beautiful! I used my sander and scuffed it up a bit and then used a coat of clear wax to protect it.

I bought some 3” pulls from Home Depot and attached them and was done – Woot! Woot!

So easy and simple and perfect for so many storage reasons.

Like I said – this is a perfect project if you are just learning to use tools or if you only have a few minutes to build a project. If you don’t have a staple gun, use a hammer and nails – you will get the same rustic feel from the nails. Head out to Home Depot and pick up some supplies and whip up a couple of these – you will love them!

Have a great day and get building!