Creative Design Ideas using Recycled Wood Pallets

Wood pallets are more useful than they seem at first glance; with a little bit of inspiration, these tools for carrying heavy objects with forklifts can serve dozens of design purposes both inside and outside of your home. There are tons of different types of pallets, and whether you have a few two-way entry wing pallets or you're stocked to the brim with four-way entry close-boarded pallets, you'll be able to find design ideas that are perfect for your particular subtype. Figuring out the best way to use your wood pallets can be hard, so we've collected some of the best wood pallet reclamation ideas around for your consideration.

Patio & Garden

If your wood pallets are already somewhat beaten up, one of the best places you can deploy them is outside in your garden or on your patio. Here are a few ideas to help you get started:

Go Vertical to Make a Unique Planter Platter

Since wood pallets spend their working lives in horizontal positions, most design buffs wouldn't even think to set them upright. However, if you break through to the other side of this common type of cognitive dissonance and stand your pallet on its end, you'll see that the crevices in its underbelly serve as the perfect spots to house yoghurt container-sized planters. To perfect the rustic chic look, you might want to paint your new planter stand in a muted blue, orange, or green tone.

Build a Colorful Garden Bench

Garden benches are made to look grungy, but you can break with convention by painting your new pallet-derived benches in bright, upbeat colours. This project is quite easy; simply lay two or three pallet sections next to each other in stacks of two, and strip off a couple of rails from a few more pallets to make bench backs. Once you're done, teal, magenta, and sea green are good paint colours to pick.

Living Room

If you effectively use pallets that are in good condition, it's easy to make a piece that's worthy of your classy living room. Here are some examples of the projects you could try:

Set Up a Reclaimed Coffee Table

Pallets are already the perfect size for coffee tables, so if you want, you can take the easy route and simply stack two or three pallets on top of each other and call it good. On the other hand, you might want to be more creative and involve some stylish legs and a wood finish.

Build a Couch Base for Your Cushions

All you need to make an incredible base for a couch is a few pallets that match the colours of your living room. To get started, place a few pallets next to each other to form a base, and then add a second layer. Use metal plates or another type of hardware to fuse all of the pallets, and you can even make a sectional sofa if you add another stack of pallets at a right angle to your original section. Then, you'll just need to lay some foam cushions on top of the pallets to complete your couch; make sure that your foam is thick and rigid enough to cushion your weight effectively when you sit down to stream movies or entertain guests.

Kitchen

Reclaimed wood can make your kitchen look like it belongs in the French countryside. Try some of these simple ideas to get started:

Make Your Wine Bar

Don't know what to do with all of your wine? If you have a space that's cut out for it, build yourself a recycled wood wine bar. On one side, carve out an area to store all of your bottles of burgundy and bubbly, and add a sheet of glass to the top to recreate the appearance of a real bar.

Create a Few Rustic Bottle Holders

If you're looking for just the thing to cart bottles of artisan beer around to all of your friends during summer barbecue season, why not build a few bottle holders to bring out cold ones and collect empties? To complete the image in style, screw a bottle opener onto the side of each of your bottle holders.

Be Brave and Build a Table and Chairs

Building your kitchen table requires a lot of different tools and technical know-how, but if you feel like you've got the right stuff, you can save a lot on materials if you use reclaimed pallets to build a table and chair set that you and your family will love for decades to come. Since you're already swimming against the stream when you use reclaimed materials to make a table, you might as well be creative and use a design that no one has ever seen before.

Bedroom

Don't forget your bedroom as you come up with creative ways to improve your home with recycled wood pallets:

Surround Your Bed with Reclaimed Trim

If you just repainted your bedroom and you can't figure out which style of trim would look best up against your ceiling, look no further than wooden pallets. If you strip off the beams of a few pallets and run them endwise along the top of your wall, you'll have created the appearance of a rustic cabin without even trying.

Build a Bed for Your Kids

Building a complete bed for you and your spouse might seem like too much of an undertaking, but a smaller bed for your kids shouldn't be a problem. While you're at it, be creative, and try to make this miniature bed look like a treehouse or a rustic wooden bridge.