You say ‘Ammunition Boxes.’ I say ‘Shelves.’

Happy Sunday!

This past week was full of projects. Maple hunted, shot, butchered and ground roughly 70 lbs of caribou meat. In the tradition of giving back what we so generously get we always give a portion of the meat away to close family and friends. The remainder will be kept for us to eat from now to August (when our larder will *hopefully* be replenished by Salmon from Chitina.)

While Maple was occupied with the massive amount of work that is butchering and processing meat, I was busy making shelves out of some amazing boxes that Maple brought home from the Print Shop. The boxes were an ugly beige, but they were made out of real wood and had awesome built-in handles. Maple did a little research and, as close as he could tell, these boxes were used to ship ammunition in the 50’s and 60’s. Cool bit of history to have in one’s house.

We brought the boxes home and were brainstorming where to put them. I had a flash of inspiration that the two boxes could replace ‘the blue thing’ (our affectionate term for a wooden ‘thing’ we brought home from the TS.) I painted ‘the blue thing’ blue (over it’s original color of ‘ugly’ circa 1976) but even with it’s perky blue color ‘the blue thing’ never really found a home in the Garagehome; it just sort of took up a lot of space without actually providing much storage space back (though it did have cool sliding shelves.)

Back to the TS it goes (unless some faithful follower of ‘Maple and Me’ (who resides in Fairbanks) really wants it.) You know how established, sponsored blogs have giveaways from ‘Ruche’ and ‘Other Indie Stores’? My blog will have ‘Giveaways’ from the Transfer Site.

Back to the boxes. The boxes were pretty dirty (after hanging out in the Print Shop for roughly 40 years) so cleaning them was the first step. They also had a lot of tape that had apparently been glued on them 40 years ago that required a razor to get off. Lastly the boxes had to be sanded and painted. Maple and I chose a flat black, which is a far cry from the blues, reds and oranges that populate our Garagehome (apparently Maple’s Scando-taste is rubbing off on me.)

The shelves took me about five days to finish, but they turned out AMAZING. Always nice when you get to say that about craft projects.

Ammunition boxes.

Lots o’ tape.

Built-in Handles.

Tape begone! (Also known as ‘The Scraping Begins…’

The sanding tools.

All sanded down.

Now to add paint!

The painting begins. The beige showed through more than I thought it would so the shelves ended up needing two coats of paint.

Back in black.

In the pursuit of a true ‘Crafy Crafty-ness Reveal!’ here are some super awesome ‘Before’ and ‘After’ shots.

BEFORE

The ‘blue thing’ in all it’s mostly-unusable-space glory! (Only those top three segments could be used for storage. That whole bottom area was just to give ‘the blue thing’ height.)

AFTER