For the Record

I have quite the record collection. Or at least for someone who rarely listens to records, I have quite the collection. I loved the way I displayed my records when I lived at home. My step dad made this AMAZING closet that I adored. It went up about half of the wall and I set up all of my records and the player up on top of that. Since moving out, I have had quite a few different setups for my records, some much better than others.

In college, I had all of my records in milk crates with a piece of wood meant for a shelf on top to hold my record player…

This was… obviously not a great setup. I inherited some of the milk crates and then I bought some similar crates at Menards as my collection grew.

These crates started to crack and break from the weight of holding the records and the player, so I knew I had to come up with a new solution.

I decided to made something new and a bit more stable to hold my collection. I went to Menards and bought some wooden crates, and got a four-foot shelf to use as the top. I painted two coats of white acrylic paint on each of the crates.

Here was the completed project, styled with paintings that I had finished. I loved the way this turned out, and loved the simplicity of it. I also loved that there was room in each of the crates to hold art and plants as well as the vinyls themselves.

I kept this set up for years…. and years. There really wasn’t anything wrong with the way that this was set up, and I did really love the way it worked for my collection. Plus, bonus, when I moved into a new apartment, I could keep all of my records in the crates for safe and easy transport.

Fast forward about 3 years, I am living in a different apartment with my husband. I still have my record collection in my crates and have moved it about 17,000 times around our apartment and something about it just hasn’t felt right. Not to mention, I bought an adorable mid-century modern style record holder and the top board just wasn’t wide enough to hold that.

I also have realized that the older I have gotten the more color I want around me. I am in love with eclectic styles and color. This was such a simple thing that I could dress up to add in some color to our apartment. I decided that I wanted to paint the inside of the crates as well as add a new board to the top.

When picking out the colors for the inside of the crates, I wanted something bright and cheery. My immediate thought was my “Have a nice day” needle punched sign I made for my plant room. This inspired me to go with pastels.

My husband and I took a trip to our local craft store and spent what felt like 45 minutes looking at the acrylic paint. Thankfully, Ben was totally on board with the pastels and was much better at picking out colors than I was. We grabbed our four different colors and went on our way!

When we got home, I started by deconstructing my setup. I took out the cat beds (that the cats haven’t actually slept in for about 2 months), and recruited my wonderful husband to help me carry the heavy record-filled crates to a different room for temporary storage.

Because I had done two coats of white paint years before, I decided to not worry about any sanding or priming for the new colors. I cleaned out the dust-filled crates and got to work!

I spent my wild Saturday night painting four crates in my kitchen while watching documentaries on Netflix (The Life and Death of Marsha P. Johnson, for those who were wondering). It truly was the dream weekend for me <3.

I, of course, had to put the crates on top of the kitchen counter to avoid having the cats crawl around in them and track pastel paint around our apartment. Putting the crates on the counter did not ease my anxiety I had all night though, lol.

I woke up Sunday morning and to my pleasant surprise, the crates were left untouched on the counter and there were no little paw prints found throughout the apartment.

After completely drying over night, I began to move the crates back to their place in the living room. I tried about four different positions and orders of colors before I decided that was the one I would go with.

Next on the agenda was to work on the board for the top of the crates.

Now for this part of the project, I knew that I wanted a very light brown color, similar to the brown frame of the “Have a Nice Day” sign. This was perfect for me because I absolutely hate using wood stain. I hate that you have to use it outside, you have to let it sit, and everything else about it. I’m lazy about crafts sometimes, and I am so okay with that. Even thought it was a whopping 36-degree January Iowa day and I could have gone outside and used real wood stain, I decided to go a different route. I read online you could use coffee for a very light stain – who knew?!

I brewed up a pot of coffee and made my way to Menards to pick up my piece of wood I’d be using for the top.

I let my coffee brew while I made my trip to the store. Once I found the board that I liked for size and shape, I checked out and went back home to get started.

I read that letting the coffee sit in the fridge would help get a little bit of a deeper color. I’m really gullible so even if that isn’t true I still tried it.

After letting my coffee cool, I took a piece of an old t-shirt and got to work. I just dipped the fabric in the coffee and spread the coat evenly. I let the coffee dry in between coats, and repeated three times total.

To be completely honest, I am not convinced that this did much, BUT I loved having the coffee smell and really enjoyed this much more than traditional staining. It might seem like I’m in denial but I really am excited to give this “hack” another try in the future.

Once the board was completely dry, I went to re-assemble my collection.

Of course the first thing to do was to decide the order of the colors.

Here was the order I settled on. From here, I placed my record player on top and painstakingly placed each of my records back into the top two crates. While this was an extreme workout for someone like me, this process proved to be very fun for me! It gave me a great opportunity to look through my collection.

I was lucky enough to get most of my records in my collection from my parents. When I first got these records, I was most excited about the Elton John, Billy Joel and Led Zepplin records and admittedly didn’t really make note of what absolute gems I had in my collection.

Some of my “new” favorites were Bette Midler, and this jazz record. In my hometown, we have a yearly summer festival called Sturgis Falls. This record is from the jazz festival part from 1978. I love history and thought it was so cool to find something like this in a collection I already own!

After getting hundreds of records back into the crates, I put the cat beds back into place and she was done!

Hopefully I’ll get a better picture of this in the future, lol. But I love how subtle the new colors are with this set up. The colors poking through on the bottom is so fun, and is exactly what I was hoping for. I think in the future I will utilize all four crates for records and do a bit more styling, but for now this is exactly what I wanted.

I love the bright colors and the fun, expressive way to functionally store my collection. This set up has worked quite well for me for a number of years, and with this upgrade, I’m sure i’ll be able to enjoy it for many more years to come!

Happy crafting!