Friday, May 14, 2010

Recycled modular decking -phase one

There's a big huge movement on making things out of pallets. And since we're oh-so trendy over here *snicker* we made a project, too. Here is phase one of our modular deck/walkway. (please excuse the messy yard)


Leeloo is trying it out. I used leftover wood from the bunny hutch building project, a 3" piece of wood I found in the shed, a couple pieces of a wooden table and chair set and two scraps of beadboard siding. It's not complete yet, but it's a good start.


I lined up the boards on one end and predrilled holes for the 2" wood screws. On the end that hung over I used a handsaw (I'm going to have the best biceps ever) to chop off the extra. At the very end we pieced together 20" boards to fill in as much as we can before having to buy any wood. Overall, I like the look of the mulitcolored boards. They're really heavy so a strong wind or a hell-bent kid won't move them around but still able to be moved by two adults.

Costs: we bought 5 pallets from the local farmer's market so we could pick and choose which we wanted. He charged us $2 a piece, so $10 there. The other 2 were free. Since we just found extra wood laying around the house I'd estimate the cost on that to be about $8. We also found a half used thing of weather sealer to finish it with.

With screws, sealer, boards and pallets I'd estimate the total cost so far being about $22. If we had found all the pallets the cost would be about half.

Each pallet is 40"x47" or roughly 3x4' giving us a total deck size of 84 sq. ft. I'll be doing more work on this over the weekend and will update as I move along.

3 comments:

Jessica said...

That looks amazing!! We have picked up a couple of pallets for free around town, but hadn't come up with any good uses for them yet except for boxing in our compost pile.

Lara Katherine Mountain Colley said...

This is an awesome project! It turned out so beautiful too with the multicolored wood interspersed. I'm definitely going to share this pallet deck idea with my husband.

Fujisawa Rob said...

I like the multicolored look too. I was skeptical because the spacing of the boards on the pallets isn't uniform, but Crystal had the idea to use the 1x2's ($.97 for 8') which can be used singly, doubled, etc.

That plant next to the corner of the shed was beautiful, until the cold snap hit earlier this year. It had been transplanted when I built the shed, and soaked up rainwater off the roof. It was a corn plant sort of thing.