Monsoon Rains: Wooden Pallet Shelf

Saturday 18 August 2012

Wooden Pallet Shelf

How to start with this

and end up with this

Wood pallets come in several sizes and types. The ones I scored from my garden cinder block delivery were large and looked like this:

This was too big for the projects I wanted to try and so I put it off for a while. Until on the way to work one day I spied a stack of pallets that were just the right kind -- stronger boards and also heat treated. I talked to the owner of the beer wholesaler and got me a couple of those boards. They looked like the first pic on this post.

I started by sawing off the appropriate end of the pallet using a Ryobi reciprocating saw. To end up with this

It already looked like a shelf, except it had no bottom. To make a bottom, I sawed off one of the narrower planks on the remaining piece of the pallet which gave me this

And the leftover pallet looked like this

Hmm this itself is an interesting shape and is giving me more ideas. But, I have to stick to my project on hand for now.

Then came the Grand Sanding! I used some 3M sand paper with coarse and medium grit, but soon tired of it and decided to invest in a power sander. So got me a Ryobi orbital 1/4 sheet sander and went to town on the boards with it.

I then used Minwax Espresso satin to stain the bottom board to see if I would like this color for the entire shelf.

I really loved it, but was not too sure that I would like for the whole shelf to be this color, seeing as it is so dark. So I decided to paint part of it white with some house paint I had lying around and stain part of it this color.

All I had to do now was attach the bottom to the shelf and then hang it over the rods in the kitchen nook (see here for the kitchen nook). I originally planned on using an L-bracket on the inside to screw the bottom to the rest of the shelf, but it was impossible to get into that tight spot with my screw driver. So, I found some wood screws that I simply used to screw the bottom to the sides of the shelf