Building A Pallet Wall

Turning the plain white wall in our entertainment room into a rustic pallet wall was the first major home project Danny and I had done for a while. We spent an entire weekend creating it, and it's one of the projects we're most proud of in the house.

This is how it started - just a section of wall like any other.

I taped it off and spray painted it black so the white wall wouldn't show through the cracks and crevices of the pallet boards. Using a piece of cardboard in addition to the painter's tape helps, but there can still be problems. For instructions on how to remove over-spray from wood, read this. (Yes, this is the voice of experience talking.)

No two boards are the same, and they're definitely not evenly cut, so painting the wall black will keep those imperfections from standing out.

Then came the muscle part - Danny used a Sawzall reciprocating saw to cut through the nails in the pallet and release all the boards. This is by far the easiest way we've found to disassemble a pallet, and two sets of hands made the work go much more smoothly.

Once all the pallets were broken down - we used about 12 pallets total for the wall - we sanded them...

...stained them...

...and laid them out to dry.

The next day, we arranged them by width so we'd have fairly even rows and began to attach them to the wall with Liquid Nails and a nail gun. The trick was finding the right length of nail to go through different sizes of boards and securely into the wall. The boards are all different lengths, too, so we staggered them across the wall so they didn't all start and stop in the same place.

After getting about a third of the wall done, we went back and cut down boards to fit in the spaces at the ends of rows. A circular saw right outside the patio door made this very simple.

The best part of our wall story is from the last hour or so. We had two outlet covers to work around, and the rows above them worked perfectly, coming right to the top of the covers without us measuring anything. Then we discovered we had boards the exact width of the covers, so those went in between and on either side of them. The space below the outlets was the same width as two boards and a little over an inch. We ripped another board in three pieces and fit them in the gaps.

We adore this wall, and we have plans to make a dart board cabinet to go in the middle. We'll share that with you as soon as we're done!