Well, so much for second summer.  I enjoyed it while it lasted, and then enjoyed watching the snow come down last night.  Looks like I’ll be getting the parka back out again.

I apologize to all of you who are not local.  Rather than an in depth how-to, today’s post is really just a sales pitch.

For this box.

I purchased this box back when my friend Sue and I were hosting occasional sales out of my carriage house.

Now that we no longer have a sale, the box has been wasting away up in my carriage house storage.  When we hauled all of our summer things up there to store them for the winter, I realized the existing green paint made this box perfect for Christmas.

And it’s big enough that you could put a full size Christmas tree in it.

So I brought it out and cleaned it up.  Then I pulled out a couple of stencils and some Dixie Belle paint in Drop Cloth and added a little design to one side.

This is a combination of two different stencils from Maison de Stencils, this one and this one.  I put a quick coat of Dixie Belle’s flat clear coat over the whole side of the box and called it good.

I realized after taking my initial photos that the box looked deceivingly small in most of them, as though it’s just the size of a typical wooden fruit crate.

However, sitting as it is in the photo above, it is 14.5″ tall, 32.25″ wide and 23.25″ deep (front to back).  It’s big.  Plenty big enough to hold a tree.

I typically used it standing on its side during the sales to display items on top and inside.  Standing on its side the tall way, the box is 32.25″ tall, so a nice height for display.

I could also stand it on its side the other way and have it be 23.25″ tall.  Either way, it was quite versatile for display purposes and I loved the look of those slats of mismatched faded wood in the back.

That oversized jingle ball that I used as a prop really isn’t helping to show the size of the box at all, so I threw my Christmas tree farm truck on the top.

I’m not sure that’s helping either.  This is one of those cases where you’ll have to rely on the measurements.

By the way, Sue painted that truck aqua, added the Christmas tree label on the door, and gave it to me for my birthday one year (I told you she was good!).

Normally I would take something like this box in to Reclaiming Beautiful to sell, but this box is large enough to be a bit unwieldy.  So I decided to attempt to sell it on my own before dragging it down there.

So, if any of you locals are looking for an amazing, authentically aged wooden crate to put your tree in this year, this one is for sale for $45.  Email me at qisforquandie@gmail.com if interested.