DIY Farmhouse Style Chicken Wire Basket Shelf

Hey guys! 🙂

Do you have a lot of vintage finds that are on the small side and are just not easy to display? 

I have a TON of smaller finds from my grandfather’s flea market trips back in the day. I’ve sorted through it all and made collections of similar finds (clocks, watches, cameras, etc.) but I never had a good way of displaying them. I’ve tried to put them on a side table or a regular shelf, but they would just get lost visually on large, flat surfaces. I wanted something to do something that would put everything roughly at eye level to make the finds pop out visually.

I was really stumped about what to do, until I came across these baskets on Amazon:

Bottle Cap Wide Wire Basket with Screws, 9-Inch

This post contains Amazon affiliate links for your convenience to help you find the supplies I used to make this project. I make a small commission if you order through my links, but it doesn’t cost you anything more! If you do, thank you!

They’re narrower than most hanging baskets I’ve seen before – they measure 9 inches long x 4 1/2 inches high (back) and 2 1/4 inches high (front) x 1 3/4 inches deep. That’s pretty narrow, but they were perfect for displaying my small, lightweight finds. 

I had some repurposed cabinet doors I made over last year that I presently wasn’t doing anything with. I measured their width and they’d work perfectly with the baskets I was eyeballing on Amazon, so I ordered three of them.

I laid everything out and moved the baskets around until I got them around where I wanted them, then I measured everything all out to make it all nice and even and marked the screw holes. (I forgot to take a picture at this point and already put in the screws, so just imagine that the screws are just the marks where the screws are supposed to go). The cabinet door measures 40 inches high by 15 inches long and the screw holes are 12 inches apart from basket to basket.

I drilled in the screws with my handy BLACK+DECKER LDX120C 20-Volt MAX Lithium-Ion Cordless Drill/Driver. It is so lightweight, but powerful enough for all my DIY projects. And it’s so lightweight! My general contractor husband is always borrowing it from me despite having his own supposedly better drills. 🙂

I attached the baskets and was really pleased with how it turned out! I had already hung the cabinet door previously so it already had d-rings on the back.

I used the vintage cameras from my grandfather’s collection and mixed them in with some old photos, postcards and some other vintage finds to create a travel photography vignette.

Do you like the 3-D display frames? Here’s the tutorial for it: DIY Farmhouse Style 3-D Display Frames

I hope you enjoyed my DIY Farmhouse Style Chicken Wire Basket Shelf tutorial and it helps you display all your smaller vintage finds!