Introduction: Recycled Floating Shelf With Glass Jar Storage & Superfood Paint

About: Maker guy with a lot of love for paper and cardboard. Recently also working with recycled plastics. other related interests are photography, youtube, recycling, etc :-)

For this recycling project, i used glass jars containing expired or leftover food found in my kitchen cabinet and fridge. Glass jars can be quite handy for organising your desk or workspace. When you apply them on the bottom of a shelf like in this project, it can expand your storage room quite good! One of the jars contained superfood Spirulina ( trust me it tastes terrible :-) ) but along with the bad taste, the color of the algue powder is quite nice! Also, when adding a little bit of this powder to a glass of milk, it gives a beautiful green color to it. So i thought... lets try it out as a natural woodstainer for the wooden shelf :-) The reclaimed wood was found in the garden and in need of some restauration. I cutted the ends off and sanded the surface and this piece of wood will become the floating shelf. The 2 steel brackets where found in a dusty corner of my workspace. These are basically the ingredients to work with in this project :-)

Step 1: Collect Materials

List of basic ingredients:

- glass jars with lid
- piece of wood that could function as shelf
- metal brackets of anything that could work as a shelf bracket
- saw, screwdriver, drill, bucket, spray paint, acrylic, paintbrush, sanding machine.

The piece of reclaimed wood was this project's starting point. The edges where clean cut and the surface got sanded and splinters removed.

Step 2: Reusing the Spirulina As a Wood Stainer

I didn't liked this algue powder as a superfood supplement so i was about to throw it away. Since it's a recycling project, i thought maybe i could use it as paint because it has a quite intense colouring ability. Only a little bit of this powder could turn your glass of milk into a green witch poison :-).

Mix some of the powder with half a glass of water and let it soak. Stir until you get a bit of a workable thick liquid and start brushing the wood. You can see it becomes super dark! I thought it would turn a bit lighter while drying but that never happened. Feeling a bit disappointed with its final look i tried to blend in a little bit of white acrylic and that turned out great! Superfood paint winner :-)

Step 3: Cleaning the Jars

Wash the jars and remove the labels. Dry the jar lids well so you can paint them afterwards. I spray painted them white. If the glue of the labels is difficult to remove, try terpentine or sticker remover to get rid of the glue.

Step 4: Assembling Time!

When the spirulina paint is dry, the jars are cleaned and labels removed and the jar lids are ready, we can start to assemble :-) Try out the position of the jars and remember to keep some room for your hand, to be able to loosen/tighten the glass jars. Use 2 screws for applying the jar lids to the wood, to make sure they are not going to rotate.

Step 5: Wall Installation

mount the steel brackets on the wall and mount the shelf afterwards. You are ready!

Step 6: Enjoy Your Extra Shelf Space! :-)

Perfect time to organise your desk and enjoy your result.

Ciao!

Recycled Speed Challenge

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Recycled Speed Challenge