Decorative Jewelry Display From a Recycled Drawer

When my girlfriend moved into her new apartment, she needed somewhere to store her jewelry. Something that didn't take up precious desk or dresser space. She had previously perused old magazines and saw a wall-mounted display for jewelry. Days later she found a discarded drawer on the side of the road and knew she found the perfect item to make her jewelry display.

What's great about it is that this doesn't just store jewelry; it displays it. You'll have an upcycled, space-efficient, and decorative piece for the wall! Finally and perhaps most importantly, it's really easy to make. You don't need special tools, skills, or much raw material; you just follow 6 simple steps.

1. Find an old drawer
2. Sand the drawer
3. Prime the drawer
4. Decorate the drawer
5. Screw in the hooks
6. Mount onto the wall

1. Old wood drawer (from a dresser, desk, etc.)
2. 220 and 320 grit sandpaper (ours from Home Depot: 220, 320)
3. Interior primer (we used Benjamin Moore Natural Interior Primer in Eggshell from a local hardware store)
4. Self screw-in hooks (ours from Home Depot)
5. Acrylic paints (example from Michaels)
6. Wide paintbrush (and others if you want to paint designs. Example set)

Simple enough, right? Whether it’s from an old dresser, desk, or on the side of the road where we got ours, any drawer should do. The ideal drawer should have fairly narrow sidewalls so it doesn’t protrude too far out into the room. Alternatively, you could make one yourself out of some 2x4’s and a sheet of plywood. If your drawer has metal bars and wheels on the side, be sure to remove those.

Tips:

• The drawer should have fairly narrow walls so they don't protrude too far out into the room.
• The drawer should protrude a little bit off the back so that it can be mounted on a wall with a nail.

Sand all surfaces of the drawer first with 220 grit sandpaper, then again with 320 grit sandpaper.

Tips:

• Do this outside if possible and use a brush or wet towel to brush away the dust.
• Have a vacuum ready if inside to clean up.

Use a wide brush and apply the primer to the drawer. Start with the front and side panels let it dry with the unpainted side on the ground. Once dried, prime the back panel and dry again with the back panel facing up.

Tips:

• We used the primer as the background color so we would have to do less painting.
• The primer we used was an eggshell white but we wanted more of an off-white so we just mixed in a little bit of yellow ochre acrylic to get an off-white color.

This is where you get to be creative. Using regular acrylic paint, paint any design! It can be a smooth coating of your favorite color, a cool pattern, or anything you can imagine. Doesn't even need to be painted. It could be decorated with stickers, wallpaper, or fabric!

For our design, we were inspired by Chinese watercolor paintings of cherry blossoms. We sketched out a rough sketch for the branches based on the image above, and then painted the branches and did little dollops and brush strokes for the petals.

Tips:

• If you do a sketch, do it lightly in pencil, that way you don't need to be worried about it showing through if you don't paint perfectly over it. You also then don't need to erase it. It's just a guide.

(Fourth image is from a magazine, the fifth image was our inspiration so linking that as well here)

Lay the self-screwing hooks in the drawer so you play around with various layouts that you like. We did ours with fairly even spacing between hooks but with no hooks inline vertically with each other so that the jewelry does not overlap when it hangs down. We also tried to minimize the hooks being in line horizontally to prevent them from looking like a uniform pattern. This gives it an organized, yet free-flowing look.

To screw in the hooks, you need to apply a decent amount of pressure to get a small hole started. Once the threads start to catch it should be easy. If it's hard to get started, lightly hammer a nail to get the hole started so the threads can catch. Alternatively, if you have a drill, you can make pilot holes with a screw.

Ours poked through the back which was fine since it didn't touch the wall when we hung the drawer. If it is a problem, you can use a file to file it down or cover them with a dab of hot glue.

Tips:

• Do a layout of the hooks before starting screwing in.
• Don't set any of the hooks too low. Too low means that jewelry can't really hang well.
• Don't align hooks vertically to prevent overlap, and minimize it horizontally for a free-flowing aesthetic.
• If you can't get enough pressure on the hooks to screw them in, tap a nail to get a hole started.

You can do this in many different ways. We used a level to measure a straight horizontal line where the top of the drawer would hang. We then nailed two nails on this line with a distance between them equal to 1/3 of the length of the drawer.

If this isn't an option with yours, you can buy D rings (which are used to hang frames) and use some framing wire to mount it that way (link to a tutorial on that). You screw in the rights level to each other on the left and right, tie in the wire and hang the wire on a nail.

Tips:

• Use 2 nails for more stability if it gets bumped (since it's something you use rather than look at like a painting)
• Use a leveler to set the nails level
• The distance between the nails should be 1/3 the length of the drawer ideally, though not a big deal if not.