Crate Seating

So I had seen the cute crate seating that others were posting on Pinterest, and wanted to make some for my classroom.  Lucky for me, my friend who teaches second grade wanted to make them too, so we were off on a hunt for the cheapest, yet most durable supplies we could find.  Here is what we used:

Crates - I had a bunch of milk crates at school which I was planning to use, but unfortunately they were actual milk crates and didn't have the lip inside for the seat to sit on.  So, we picked  up crates at Target for $3.49 each when the back to school stuff came out.  Sadly, I went back a week or two later and saw them on sale... but I'm going to just try to forget about that part.

Plywood - We are lucky to have a really great maintenance guy where we work, and he agreed to use leftover scraps of wood he had at school and to cut the plywood seats for us once we bought the crates!  He even cut little angled corners so there would be room for the fabric in the corners.  Did I mention how lucky we are to have him around?

Fabric - We went back and forth on what to use to cover the seats.  Shower curtains would be easy to clean off and seemed better for those unfortunate lice outbreaks that happen, but they didn't seem very durable.  Regular fabric seemed too thin.  We thought that outdoor canvas type fabric would be ideal, but it was $20/yd.  Lucky for us, JoAnn fabric ran a sale where it was 60% off, and I had a coupon for an extra 25% off.  Seemed like a good enough deal for us.

Foam - Knowing how expensive those foam sheets can be, we opted to go with a mattress pad, which we picked up at Walmart for about $11.  It was enough to make 7 crates (3 for her and 4 for me) stacking them two high for extra padding, with some left over.

Ribbon - to create the pull tab
Staple gun and staples

We doubled the foam on top of the fabric and stacked the plywood on top, then stapled it all down, being careful to tuck the corners in as much as possible.  After it was all stapled, we tacked on the ribbon loop.

Here are some pictures of the finished products for the Second Grade room.  We still have 4 more crates to finish for Third Grade!