We Love Pallets!

We've been meaning the get the tiny yard at the back of our kitchen sorted out for ages, this is a bit of a dead space as it not really big enough to do much with, it also gets very little sunlit the main garden being at the front of our cottage and south facing. I use it mostly to grow ferns and hosta's so I have something nice to look out the kitchen window at! Heres how it looked over the summer...

So last week Rich made a start on building us some more storage in this space, the only issue was we had to spend as little as possible, having looked at garden storage units and small shed online the prices range for £80 - £300 which there was no way we could afford. So Rich decided to try making something out of the pallets our roofing tiles where delivered on last month.

Old pallets are so amazingly useful, they are a great source of free wood, most people tend to chuck them out and if you are lucky enough the have a log burner none of the off cuts need go to waste. My Dad was a big fan of making useful stuff out to them and Rich is carrying on the tradition.

The most tedious bit of working with pallet wood is breaking the buggers apart without smashing them to bits...

Once you do manage to break them up you get a really surprising amount of useable wood, this combined with all the other wood we have been hoarding for years meant we had more than enough. Rich even reused the old timber that came off our roof, our roofer had wanted us to get a skip but as we never chuck anything if we can possibly reuse it we kept it all!

Here it is after 2 days, the frame is mostly the wood from the roof clad in pallet wood.

Day 3 - now with pallet wood door, one of our neighbours had some old garage doors which he didn't want which where covered in corrugated metal, Rich chopped it down to size and used if for the roof. Even the hinges and door knob where things we already had.

Luckily we had a load of outdoor wood paint left over from our other shed so now anything thats wooden in the garden gets painted blue, luckily we both love the colour!

Looking pretty!

As we still had lots of wood left over we decided to finally build another log store, as we pretty much run the log burner all winter to keep the gas bill down, we usually run out of wood after a month or so in our current store so needed something bigger.

We did spend £13 buying a sheet of corrugated bitchumen roofing, we had thought we might use the corrugated metal sheets again but as the store is at about forehead height it was inevitable that one of us would end up doing minor brain surgery to ourselves on the sharp edge!

So the store ended up being made of an old bed frame, pallet wood and the soffit board we had to removed from the back of the house when the roof was done, one end had rotted but 90% of it was still good solid wood.

We are both really happy with the end result, more storage and it still looks pretty out there. The whole project cost us £23 in total and about a week of Richards time on and off.

And of course all off cuts got used too...