He does, however, love putting things inside of stuff. One of his favorite games is to put little items into a bucket and then dump the bucket out and put everything back into the bucket again. I decided to try and use this to my advantage in order to maybe get a little help cleaning up and deciding we needed a bin system for storing books. Regular bins aren't cute enough to put out in the living room and baskets can be pricey (I didn't already have one that was the right size to fit under my table). Instead, I threw some craft supplies together and came up with this...
And the best part was that is was free because I made it from stuff I had on hand. Ya'll know that free is my favorite price! Here's how I did it:
Step 1: Get a Box
It's not very pretty is it? That's okay. We'll fix that right up. Go ahead and cut all of the top flaps off of the box and re-tape the bottom if necessary in order to reinforce it.
Step 2: Cover the box
Looking a little less ugly now, eh? I had a roll of brown packing paper from dollar tree that I used to cover the box (and had tons left over I might add). I cut a large piece to size and then crumpled it to give it some texture before adhering it to the box with hot glue. If you don't want to pick up paper from Dollar Tree, you could re-use paper grocery sacks or maybe even use (uncrumpled) wrapping paper or fabric.
Step 3: Trim the Edges
The raw edges don't look so hot when left alone, so I covered them with some double fold bias tape and hot glue. Be careful, though. Hot Glue is very hot and bias tape can be very thin. Don't burn yourself doing this part.
Step 4: Decorate
Once you have the main part of the box made, now you just have to decorate it. I decorated mine by wrapping some leftover black yarn around the top. The black boxes on the front are pieces of wood painted with chalkboard paint that were left over from another project. I hot glued those to the front as well and wrote BOOKS in chalk. If we ever need to repurpose the box for something else, I can just erase and re-write.
That's it!
This box was super simple, took less than an hour to make and was right on budget. I'm sure our house will be seeing many more re-covered boxes in our future as a less expensive alternative to baskets.
I'm sharing here:
