Guest Bathroom: Crate Shelving

I definitely wanted some storage in our guest bathroom, and I considered a few different options.  I loved IKEA's Lack shelves, but we were trying to do this remodel on the cheap.  And $50 for mostly-aesthetic shelving wasn't going to make it in the budget.

 From left:  here, here, and here

So then I started searching for reclaimed materials that would make good shelves.  Drawers, windows, wine crates, and more.  But unfortunately drawers didn't seem very practical (probably not deep enough, and which way would you hang them, anyway?), windows were pretty but again had not much storage space, and no one in town uses wooden wine crates any more.  Boo!

Clockwise from top left:  here, here, here, and here

The closest match we found was this crate at a store back home, which I loved.  But as pretty as it was, I couldn't stomach forking out $16 for a single crate.

So when we found these guys at Mr. Great Indoors' family's furniture store, I was sold.

I wanted them to be Sherwin Williams' "Moody Blue," similar in color to the crate we'd seen.  The greenish tint would be enough to play off the blues in the room and provide a fun little pop.

Mr. GI actually ended up finding a quart of oops paint that looked like a lighter version of Moody Blue, but it turned out to actually be more robin's egg blue rather than that hint of green.  Especially when I pulled everything out together and it was overwhelmingly BLUE.

So it's incredibly possible that I'll be repainting these suckers at some point.  But for now, here they are in all their blue glory.

I still need to do a little touch up on the bottom crate, but I've been procrastinating (we also still have several sets of paint brushes in our fridge that I need to wash...).  Mr. GI used his jigsaw to take off the last slat of the bottom crate, since it was a little big to fit over the toilet as it was.

Obviously, I still have to style these all pretty like.

I intentionally only put one very thin coat of paint on the crates to show off the wood grain.

Mr. GI was lucky enough to be able to drill into the studs for both of these crates.  He countersunk the screws so they would sit flush with the crate instead of hanging out above the wood.

And a little before and after action for you:

What sort of storage do you have in your bathroom?

Follow along with the rest of our bathroom adventures: our dream, the before, mildewwww, every day we're drywalling (another a terrible pun), the our thrifted finds so far, ripping out wallpaper, making up my mind on a wall color, rehauling the vanity, an updated to-do list, a teaser of the floor, cleaning and wallpapering, painting, laying flooring, polishing up our light fixture, solving the mildew mystery, plus my Pinterest boards for the guest bathroom and master bathroom.