Weekend Warrior: Pallet Wall

We've been slowly making the transition from baby Bryce to toddler Bryce to big boy Bryce and we made a big leap this past weekend with a major room makeover.  At some point this winter in the midst of our frustrations with his lack of sleeping through the night we switched out the crib and put up the toddler bed.  From there, I thought it was about time to start thinking about a new color scheme for his room.  The apple green and white wainscoting was perfect for two babies whos genders were unknown prior to birth, but as Bryce got older, the need for something a bit more masculine grew.  Enter: the Pallet Wall Project.  I take no credit for coming up with this decorating idea; I might be the world's best rip-off artist.

I showed my room idea to Kevin who nodded reluctantly to the makeover, all the while silently questioning my construction abilities.  I knew this was a project I couldn't tackle alone, and quite to my surprise, my good friend Pam jumped at the opportunity to take part in the project.  I don't think I could have asked for a better friend to be a part of this- she's a methodical perfectionist- like any good pharmacist- good at math (and reading a tape measure), and had good family connections to a wide variety of much needed power tools.

Like any good construction project, there are always surprises.  Fortunately the only big surprise came early in the project as I was prepping the walls Friday afternoon.  Pulling down the wainscoting, I soon discovered it had been nailed AND glued to the wall.  So, much more time went into wall prep than anticipated.  As Pam and I said several times, there's nothing like a good piece of furniture to help hide solve wall imperfections.

Bye bye, apple green walls!

We got started Saturday morning tearing apart the pallets (compliments of SDI) with our beloved Sawsall.  That thing cut through the pallets like butter and we had ourselves a nice pile of boards.  We sanded the boards with a belt sander, which could have been the most mundane task ever, but was necessary to keep the wall from being a future source of splinters.  I felt fairly confident about the the pallets (very unlikely to have a sordid chemical-laden, raw meat or similar history) considering they were practically brand new from a paper company.  Even still, we sprayed each of the boards with a couple clear coats of polyurethane.

The sawsall was the perfect tool for the job.

White washing (1:1 paint to water) was the next step.  This truly allowed us to use creative license.  We started off with white and blue, but quickly realized that we needed gray and black to achieve the desired color scheme.  Paint is expensive, even at places like Menards, so Pam and I were absolutely tickled to find a quart of black on the mis-tint/clearance shelf for $1.

Based on other blogs doing pallet projects, we had planned to lay out all the boards on the floor and number each one in order.  We quickly found out that just wasn't going to work for us because each board was a little wonky and warped and we couldn't make a sound decision until we were up in the room butting them up to the previous row.  We likened this whole project to a big puzzle, no picture, and any piece could fit.

Doing a pre-layout, even with chalked-in lines, didn't work for us.

We took care in marking the studs with painters tape and penciled in lines horizontally every 12 inches so we could stay as close to level on each row.  The pneumatic nail gun was probably our favorite power tool and made the job go quickly.  Once we worked around the window, things cruised right along and we were quite lucky that the last two rows of boards matched up perfectly to the carpet, minus the baseboard trim. In the end we decided to not put the trim back on the pallet wall.

In the end we used about nine pallets for an 8x9 wall with several boards left over for some future coordinating decorating projects and took us 3 1/2 days to complete.  Thanks again, Pam, for helping bring this all together!

The walls are still bare but I do have some plans to decorate them in the rustic wood style shortly.