DIY: Wine Crate Coffee Table

First and foremost, tonight Amy and I visited for the first time Maple Marie Holiday Reetz. Maple is the newest member of the Reetz family and could not have better parents than Emily and Matt! She is a beautiful little grandma-featured baby and I can tell she is going to be the best little one for the two of them! Also, she has a killer name just perfect enough for a Reetz.

Check out Emily's blog to find out more about Maple. Megan [Emily's best-friend] wrote an amazing post about the day as well.

On to the coffee table...

Amy and I have been checking out thrift stores, rummage sales, and liquor stores for wine crates for several weeks now. The original intention was to make shelves out of them in our bedroom. As you all know storage is vitally important in a tiny apartment like ours. Finally this past Saturday after we spent the morning at the local farmer's market and were headed back home we were pleasantly surprised to find a 19-home neighborhood rummage sale was taking place. After hitting up about 9 of the sales we found a "Wins Milwaukee" crate which we can only assume is an old brewery crate for $10. This price is seemingly high at first but after some research we've found that $20 and more is not uncommon for old wood crates. Anyways, we purchased the crate and headed home not sure exactly what we were going to do with it as the crate was a little deep for a shelf on our wall.

So here's the DIY part. We decided to turn it into a coffee table and show you how we did it! All you need are a few supplies to make a rustic yet practical coffee table.

First you need an old wood crate.

Second, you need some flat sheets of wood. You can choose whichever kind you want, though the more used it looks the better. We were given the wood we used from a friend as firewood and they worked perfectly for the top of our table. You also need a few pieces to hold it all together as well as two small 2x4's so you can set the top into the crate.


Lastly you need a hammer and some nails.

Okay, so now that you have some supplies lay out the wood you want to use as the top of your coffee table into a pattern of your choice. Make sure they are going to extend longer than the crate on each side, but you can eye it out to your liking. We just so happened to have 6 pieces of wood of similar size and look.


Next, hammer some support beams into the underside of your 6 pieces of wood. We used 3 pieces of extra scrap wood to do this. Then take the 2x4's and nail them into the support beams with the distance at approximately the width of the crate. Like so...


Finally, put your newly built table top into your wood crate and you have yourself a Wine Crate Coffee Table!

You can then take the lid off as you wish and have storage space for blankets, magazines, crafting supplies or whatever you wish!

It looks cool and takes less than 15 minutes to build. It was definitely worth the $10 we spent on it and we couldn't be happier with the turnout. It looks great, gives us a place to lift our feet, set down our morning coffee, and adds a little bit of storage which is always important.
The best part? We did it ourselves and saved money by doing it!

Thanks for reading!
Trevor

"Some people are born leaders"... and we prefer to follow them!

So everyone was doing it.
Blogging that is.
And we thought, hey, we're young, we're creative, we're bored... lets share our boring lives with other people.
So we are.

To begin...
We have decided to do this for a couple of reasons. First, we want to share our lives with the people we care about. But also, we have also recently discovered Do It Yourself blogs. And I would like to admit that I am completely obsessed. I look at certain ones every day sometimes twice a day, hoping one either posted late or is doing 2 posts in one day. From stalking other peoples blogs and ideas we have found certain things that work and other things that do not. As you can see from the title we are currently living in about 400 sq. ft. apartment and we need ideas on how to maximize space and money. We have done a lot of work to make this Tiny Apartment our Home and thankfully spent very little money. We thought people might be interested in our thoughts regarding these efforts and find ideas that have actually worked for us, complete non-professional DIY-ers, and perhaps see how they can also begin to DIY. So welcome to our blog and welcome to our thoughts. I hope they can be helpful or at the very least amusing.
For now, Trevor would like to make the blog "look better" while eating his home-made trailmix. He is currently waiting patiently, but I am sure this will end soon.

Thanks for reading,
Amy