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Dec 24, 2023

How to Make a Chic Wood Crate Table

By Lindsey Mather What do your local grocery store, liquor shop, farm stand, and

By Lindsey Mather

What do your local grocery store, liquor shop, farm stand, and hardware store have in common? Cheap wood crates. Bring some home, stat. (Ask for apple crates, fruit crates, or wine crates. They're also sold new at Home Depot.) Those humble wood boxes might have spent most of their time as back-of-the-store storage, but their new lives are about to begin—as cool, industrial furniture. Place one on its side and it becomes an end table with a built-in nook for throw blankets or books. Put a few around a table and you've got yourself some seating. We are fully behind these upcycling endeavors, but don't just plunk the crates down and leave it at that. A few tweaks will take the containers from serviceable to "Where'd you get that?"

P.S. Before you do anything else, sanitize them. The Spruce recommends scrubbing the surface with a dry bristled brush to remove any dust and dirt, then wiping it with a water and vinegar solution to get rid off mold and mildew. Now you're ready.

Okay, so you're probably not going to spend hours transforming your crates into pendant lights, à la this Shanghai café designed by Triad, but you can take a cue from how the firm treated the inside of the boxes. Coats of bold colors (and a little black) paint make the rustic boxes feel decidedly modern.

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Clever editor Amanda Sims put it best in her ode to furniture casters: "The addition of furniture casters won't just change the piece, it will change the room." Put a crate on its side so it stands at its tallest, and attach wheels to each of the bottom corners. With just that adjustment, it can now zip around your space, switching roles from side table to stool to footrest as you wish.

Take inspiration from Etsy shop Made Anew, which sells a wine crate outfitted with the ultimate DIY supply: hairpin legs. With their plates and predrilled holes, attaching the metal supports to your crate is dead simple, and instantly elevates it—literally and figuratively. (Pssst: We wouldn't judge if you shelled out the cash for this already-finished one, either.)

SHOP NOW: Reclaimed wooden wine crate furniture with hairpin legs by Made Anew, $324, etsy.com

Stack a bunch of crates high against a wall and, boom, a bookshelf is born. For a Connecticut coffee shop, design firm Rehabitat took it one step further by arranging the containers both vertically and horizontally, seemingly at random.

By Erika Owen

By Rachel Davies

By Vaishnavi Nayel Talawadekar

Design firm Rehabitat's one-of-a-kind shelving unit is fashioned out of simple plywood crates.