I recently used pallets to sheet some cheap shelves I made in my attic. I was riding over to Lowes to pick up some OSB when I saw the pallets and thought to myself “Hey, those are free, I bet I could use those for the shelves I’m making”
It turned out to be quite a bit more work than I anticipated to break down those pallets. I first tried banging the boards out with a hammer, and those nails really don’t want to budge without seriously damaging the wood. I ended up cutting them a bit short with my circular saw and removing them that way.
This past weekend I went and bought a bunch of 2x4s and put them up into the attic last night. I plan to build another set of shelves up in my attic and I’m going to use pallet wood again to sheet the shelves, however this time I’m going to use a sheet metal drill bit to drill out the screws with my corded hammer drill.
I found this great article about using pallet wood from toolcrib.com that advised that technique:
Woodworking with Pallets: A guide to Finding, Breaking Down, and Building with Pallets
If you really want to get inspired to do something cool with pallets checkout this guys page:
On that page you can see various structures built from Pallets, including a wood shed and a chicken coop. If you scroll all the way to the bottom you can see how one guy’s pallet wood shed doubles as a rain water harvesting system with the addition of a bit of PVC pipe gutters.
How about a Root Cellar made from Pallets?
How about decking with Pallet wood? I question the long term durability of this approach, however it’s worth a look.
What have you built with pallets? Add your own idea in the comments.
Here is one method using just a few hand tools. I might make my own video this week when I dismantle my current batch of pallets
