DIY Pallet Board Center Pieces

When I  found out my brother and his Bride were going to let me decorate everything for the reception I was so excited and had so many cute ideas I had found on Pinterest. I was really excited to do the center pieces but as my sister-in-law and I were shopping around looking at the price of flowers my dreams for the center pieces were dashed. We could barley afford any sort of center piece let alone fill them with the cheapest ugliest flowers in the store. So we went home to brainstorm about what we could build for cheap. Here is what I came up with. I decided we would put three small boxes made from pallet board wood on each table. Wrape them in burlap, lace and twine and fill them with the hydrangeas. I choose hydrangeas because although they are small flowers individually they fill up quite a bit of space in a bunch.

To make our boxes we cut our pallet board wood into 6 inch boards.

C.J. then took his nail gun and started nailing the boards together to make then into square boxes

We needed 30 boxes. To be honest, I was really surprised at how fast it was to put these together! C.J. whipped them up in about an hour or two. 

I loved the way these looked with out paint, but we wanted to paint the center pieces to help incorperate the brides colors since we were using white flowers.

After all our boxes were made we slapped some paint on them and cut stripes of burlap and hot glued it on. We bought all the burlap for the wedding at this website, burlapfabric.com. Then we wrapped lace that I found at a garage sale for seriously next to nothing. I bought a bunch of lace from an old lady for $1 and the lace we used around the boxes was one of the types of lace I bought from her. 

After that we took twine and wrapped it around the box a few times and ended it by adding an antique skeleton key and a bow.

Thanks to free pallet boards the total cost of these center pieces was probably just over  $5 dollars a table. The most expensive thing on the table is the flowers that filled our boxes and we bought those on clearance sales and divided the stem up to make the flowers go further. We used two stems of hydrangeas for each table. The votives were .10 cents a piece so those only ended up costing use .40 cents per table!