Friday, January 4, 2013

So, we made our bed out of pallets.

Total cost? $7...for the stain/sealant. 
Chad and I are all about the cheapest thing possible cause we are major tight wads. I was laying in bed one night thinking of things I could use to make our bed, for relatively free. First I was thinking I would do the whole piece of plywood, batting, and fabric for a fabric head board...but that would require me spending more than $30...I didn't want to do that. THEN I remembered that we have three pallets sitting in our garage. And plywood. And tools. Where did I get the pallets? Well, I simply found construction guys building a house and asked if I could have their pallets that were laying around, and there ya go, free pallets.
Annnnyway. I visioned this, I explained my idea to Chad, and he went to work over our Christmas/New years weekends with a little assistance from me.

What you will need:
  • Pallets, our is a king bed, and we used about 2.5 pallets.
  • nail gun (or a hammer)
  • nails (little ones, just long enough to go through your pallet and into the plywood)
  • sander (or a lot of elbow grease and sand paper)
  • screws
  • drill/screw driver
  • sheet of plywood
  • stain/sealant 
  • saw of some sort
  • something to measure with.
First, take apart the pallets. This was the longest part. Cause you have to be rough, but not too rough so the planks don't break. If we had sawzall and just cut them off it would have been much faster. This took the majority of the time actually. In hind sight, we would have made some calls and baked cookies and borrowed someones. Chad used a hammer and a little crowbar thingy to get the nails out. Really noisy, and very time consuming.

Then I measured how big we wanted the head and foodboard. Ours is a king so we made ours 80 inches long, and about two feet tall.  Then we drew with chalk on our garage floor the exact size and we laid the planks down and figured out what we wanted it to look like. For planks that are longer, just mark them and saw the excess.
THEN, cut your plywood the desired size of your head/footboards and simply nail the planks down, how you had them on your floor. We also took two planks right on top of the head and footboard to make a little ledge thingy.

For the legs, Chad took the inside pieces of the pallet that are little thicker, and did some measuring to know where to nail/screw them to the back of the plywood.
Then sand away until pretty smooth. Then stain. We chose the lightest, most natural stain, just to seal it. If you went with a darker stain, it would be really pretty too, but we were going for a lighter more natural look.

After it dried we took both the head and footboard in and drilled them, and bolted/screwed them to our bed frame.

And yes, I know I am not that great at explaining this, so if you have more specific questions just email me and I will totally help you out! And by me, I mean I will ask Chad and he'll help you out.
Also, sorry for the bad, bad, bad quality of the pictures. 


13 comments:

teamcowan said...

I love the finished product!! Well done! I don't normally like all the furniture people have been making with pallets, but I really like this! You guys did great!

Rachael said...

Awesome!!!

Teresa said...

Wow! Great job! I bet you could make some money selling those...

Jenna said...

It's beautiful!

Daniel and Belinda said...

That is incredible. Would never have thought of that. Looks amazing!!

Megan Marie said...

THAT is REALLY COOL.

Jessica Kettle said...

i have to say,
this is bitchin'.
I'm waaaay jealous. And also a little motivated to attempt it. And also, I don't really hope you die.

K.J. V. said...

Just curious, did you guys finish the back of the footboard with pallet pieces too? Or when you're in bed do you see the plywood on the inside of your footboard?

Nina said...

Awesome! I'm gonna look next time I'm there. That is so cool. Matt said he was going to pin this on his Mantresting page. Yes, it's a real thing!

Rach said...

We acutually just covered the top with one row of planks, tbe rest is covered by the matresses! Hope that helps.

Rach said...

We acutually just covered the top with one row of planks, tbe rest is covered by the matresses! Hope that helps.

Rach said...

We acutually just covered the top with one row of planks, tbe rest is covered by the matresses! Hope that helps.

Rach said...

We acutually just covered the top with one row of planks, tbe rest is covered by the matresses! Hope that helps.