Hey there! Recycling is a big part of our business so we were thrilled to get to breathe new life into sad, forgotten wood to build our own wood wall! We get a lot of compliments on it and people ask how we did it. I'm going to take some time to walk you through our pallet wall journey. I will say upfront this was probably not the most professional job, but we think it turned out great!
The first thing we did was collect a bunch of palettes. Deanna's aunt works at a store which happened to have a whole bunch of them up for grabs. The great thing was some of them were very old and some of them were new so there was a lot of variation in color on the different pieces of wood.
After this was the hardest part: separating the pieces of wood from each other. Because some of the pallets are old, the nails were quite rusted and imbedded in the wood. Also the wood gets super fragile. Deanna worked her butt off and got this all done, on a 97 degree day mind you. Some pieces could be pulled apart by hand while others needed the help of a handsaw. After a lot of work and one nail in the foot we got a whole mess of wood to work with.
The next step was where a little math came in. I organized all of the piles of wood by height so they would line up in a row together. I then measured the dimensions of the wall to figure out how the square footage of what we would need. With that number I started to arrange my rows of pallet wood. I actually arranged it on the floor first to make sure I liked the color layout. Also some of the wood was pretty scuzzy so I gave it a spray with a disinfectant cleaner and a light sanding just to make sure there's no mold or weird things!
Once the wood was all organized and ready to go we started to write on the wall. Here is where you have some options on prepping. These are things we did not do but I saw on other DIY blogs and they seem like a great idea. To prep your wall you can either A: paint it black or brown so the white doesn't shine through (Because the wood is so irregular it's virtually impossible to get a tight fit everywhere). This way you would never notice the wall behind. B: if you plan on hanging heavy items on the wall I would suggest anchoring plywood to the wall in the studs. You can create a really strong base to screw your pallets into if you use plywood first. We knew we were not hanging anything heavy, just a simple sign, so we skipped this step.
The next step was to start applying! We decided to start at the bottom and also start at the edge. This way we made minimal cuts to the pallet wood. We basically just needed to cut each end piece on the right-hand side. We used 3 to 4 inch sheetrock screws and screwed the wood right into the wall. Pretty simple!
Once finished, we found this great sign on Etsy for cheap! We just sent them our logo and they cut metal and painted it for us.
And bonus, with the left over pallet wood we made these cool shampoo shelves!
We are so happy with our wall and we wish you luck building your own!
