My first attempt at a Pinterest inspired project.

Like I mentioned a little while back, I am loving to use Pinterest as my scrapbook for ideas and inspiration. One thing I didn't want to do was pin all kinds of things and never actually DO any of them.  So when a need arose this week, I put one of my "pins" to the test.
The TV in the den was recently mounted on the wall. This meant the really awesome cheap and ugly TV stand under neath it was no longer needed. Luckily, there is a closet behind the wall that the TV is on, so it was easy to drill a couple of holes and route all of the cords to the closet. It also comes in handy for storing the cable box and anything else that the TV might need to hook up to.
For a reminder, here's the room before the TV was mounted:

 You can see it over to the left sitting up against the wall.

Here is the TV mounted.  You can see I needed something there to cover up where we routed the wires back into the room so that we didn't have to relocate the outlet. I didn't want anything too intrusive, and I couldn't find a piece at a thrift store that I wanted to tackle. That is where Pinterest comes in. A couple of weeks ago I had pinned this idea about staining crates and turning them into a furniture piece. You can see the original blog with a crate tutorial HERE. I decided to do my own simpler variation.

I stopped by Joanne Fabric and amazingly they had these crates for $10.99 a piece with 30% off! So I picked up 4.

I used the can of stain that I had left over from my house shutters and a sponge brush to stain the crates.

It is a Minwax dark walnut finish.

Here are my crates after one coat of stain. They took the stain really well and I decided that was all they needed. I could have done some kind of creative glaze/finish to make them look more "antiqued", but I decided not to.

Here they are stacked under the TV and covering up those ugly wires! They are the perfect height and are not too deep for the space.

And I went ahead and threw some accessories up there to see how I liked it. I can't believe how easy it was and how great it looks!

I love the new TV space and I think it is a HUGE upgrade from where it started! And the total cost was a little over $30 dollars because I had everything else but the crates. I'm excited about a successful first Pinterest project, and hopefully this will inspire me (and you) to take on another one soon!