1001 Goals: Christmas Tree Crate

Thursday, December 12, 2013

Christmas Tree Crate

I've seen a couple crates for Christmas trees lately, and I decided to make my own version. I didn't have any weathered wood sitting around, but I found some fencing pieces at Lowes that had been stored outside and were nicely rustic-looking.

What I used:

3 boards, 5.5"x6'
some pieces of 2"x2" that I had sitting around
an old printer table top

it was raining, so I was working on the front porch, which is covered, but everything still got wet

we've had ice storms since then, so I'm glad I didn't wait- we'd never have gotten the tree up!

The table top is from a mission-style printer table we used to have. It didn't survive one of our moves, but I was able to salvage the top. It's been sitting in my wood stash for awhile now, waiting for just the right project. When I looked through my stash, I found that it was just the right size for this project- just a smidge larger than the ugly green plastic tree stand I wanted to cover up. I believe some of the crates I've seen don't have bottoms, but I wanted to get the plastic off the floor in hopes of avoiding water damage to our wood floors.

Because the boards are so wide, I only needed to build it two boards high to cover the ugly green tree stand. After measuring and cutting my boards to fit around the table top, I built two boxes.

I placed one box around the table top and screwed the box to the table top, then screwed a 2x2 in each corner, coming from underneath.

Once the 2x2s were in place, I slid the second box over the 2x2s.

Then I used a couple screws in each corner to hold the boxes in place.

And all done!

I brought it inside and we put the tree in the stand and left the tree for a day so the branches could relax after being released from the netting.

The lower branches are close to the crate and make it a bit difficult to water the tree, but we didn't want to trim them since it's not a very tall tree.