New shelf from an old drawer

It happens in the household, well, you just need a new shelf. However, it is not cheap and, as a rule, the purchase is postponed indefinitely. What to do? I think in this case our imagination and... an old vegetable box will come in handy. Don’t be surprised, because the fashionable global tendency to give old and, at first glance, unnecessary things a second life will come in handy in our case.

And so for work we need:
- vegetable box;
- corrugated cardboard;
- three-layer napkins;
- cardboard base for the box;
- stain;
- dye;
- PVA glue;
- acrylic lacquer.

First, let's tidy up the box. You need to clean it, sand it, if there is a pattern, remove it with sandpaper.

We cover the entire surface of the box inside and outside with stain (choose the color you wish).

Now let's take the bottom of the box. I made an imitation of a brick wall, for this we will need corrugated cardboard. First, draw rectangles measuring 24 x 6 cm (the size of a lying brick) on a sheet of cardboard.

Cut along the lines and get a stack of bricks.

We measure the base along the bottom of the box. I took a sheet of an old calendar, it turned out to be quite thick to plant bricks on.

We glue the bricks onto the base in a checkerboard pattern, not forgetting to leave a gap between them. I used my own finger, but you can use a ruler.

We cut off the excess and take a three-layer napkin.

We crush it and, having previously smeared the base with bricks, apply it. As a result, we get a wrinkled (without fanaticism) surface. Apply glue on top again.

After complete drying, we begin painting the brick element. For this I used the same stain. Covered the surface completely and let it dry again.

Now, using white paint (again, choose the color individually), we go over the sunken stripes between the bricks.

This is what happened.

However, the color seemed too dark to me, so I used a kitchen sponge to apply random white spots.

I covered everything with acrylic varnish and got this element of a brick wall.

Now we glue the base into the box. After gluing the bricks, my box became one brown spot, and I decided to paint the inner walls and the end of the box with a brush of white paint. This wonderfully highlighted the base and gave the overall picture a touch of antiquity, a sort of “shabby chic”.