Vintage Bottle Tree

Today I want to share a fun project with you – a vintage bottle tree. I first saw one on vacation this summer and I was so smitten by them. Then, after doing a little bit of research, I discovered that they are a southern tradition for capturing evil spirits. I figure, if it looks pretty and keeps away evil spirits, you can’t go wrong.

This summer, we also did a MAJOR purge and organization of our garage and basement. As a result, all of my vintage bottle were in one place. After seeing how many pretty aqua bottles I had, I decided to put a little different spin on the traditional bottle tree and do it in all aqua. I also love this project because it gets the bottles out of a cabinet and being displayed. So many of them have such great character and the colors are so beautiful.

This project was super easy as well, it only took us about 30 minutes to put together. Start with your base. Strangely, we already had this from a project we never used it for. It is just a fence post with four shelf brackets attached at the base for stability.

Just drill a pilot hole and drill in at an angle to attach the brackets. This is stained, but that is a personal choice.

For each bottle, you need to drill a large pilot hole.

Then hammer in a large nail.

Then continue drilling holes in a random pattern and adding nails. This bottle tree currently holds 24 bottles. But I will continue to add to it over time, just adding more large nails for each bottle.

Then I sprayed the whole thing out with white spray paint. I didn’t go for a perfect finish because I wanted it to look somewhat rustic. Then, simply add your bottles. There really are no rules – you can use either all of the same of a good mix of sizes. I did mine in all of the same color palette, but you could do a mix of colors, clear, whatever works for your taste.

Right now I have mine in a new little sitting area we are working on, but I plan to bring it into our garden at some point. It will be color in the yard year round – imagine the blues with snow! And I plan on adding little white lights to it at Christmas time as well. And as find new aqua bottles, I will add them. I will love it even more when it is overflowing with bottles to catch the light.

So there you have it, a simple, inexpensive repurposing project! If you would like to see some of my other projects, you can visit here. You can also subscribe to receive my projects and my monthly newsletter directly to your email by clicking here. Thanks so much for reading and have a great day! Take care, Laura