A Repurposed Drawer

One more item lingering in the garage was this drawer, it was a desk's middle drawer, the two towers of drawers on each side of the desk is another project I'm working on.

I had no plans for this drawer and I just wanted to take it out of the garage. So, after giving it a good look I decided to turn it into a tray/basket, to be placed on top of a coffee table or on my kitchen island filling it with fruits.
The dimensions of the drawer 21" x 19" and especially the how shallow it is, only 3¼" deep, made go for a berry picking basket look, those with a long handle.
So, the first thing to do was to clean the drawer pretty well and remove the little thingy to hold pencils and stuff.

Since the drawer had a really nice looking front, I decided to give a very similar treatment to the back of it. A left over piece of molding was cut to surround the back of the drawer. Before attaching the molding with glue and staples that thinga maginga on the drawer was cut off to make it flat.

Again, leftover pieces of plywood (14"x 2¼") were rounded at the top and attached to the middle sides of the drawer with screws.

After filling up the holes and crannies with caulking and sanding it pretty well, this is how my berry picking basket looked:

That big base was screaming for a sign. You can download them HERE and HERE. This time I decided to create stencils with Contact paper, instead of painting the letters one by one with a paint brush. Well, cutting so many letters took forever, my pointing finger was very sore at the end.  I think I'm going to stick to the painting the letters with an artist brush for my future projects. ;)

The good part is, painting is a breeze and you end up with perfect lines!

Once dry, the letters were distressed, I used 220 grid sand paper, the acrylic paint came off quite easily. After a good cleaning, three coats of clear Poly were applied to the whole base to protect the sign.

For the handle the most warped piece of 1 x 2 was cut to size and attached with screws. The handle parts and all the outside of the basket was stained.

Finally, in order to cover the holes from the drawers hardware, chalk paint was applied to the front and back sides.

So, I went picking apples. :)

Once Spring comes around I will be picking berries.

Or as a matter of fact, any fruit will be OK. They all would look really nice in this fruit basket!

What have you repurposed lately?

You can also check my Fall Signs from repurposed drawer sides HERE.

Or a pumpkin made out of ribbon spools HERE.

Thanks for stopping by!