Pallet Furniture (and Why My Husband is Awesome)

Our kitchen is not very big. It’s an odd shape, and there’s not a lot of storage. This requires some creative thinking in order to avoid having all of our dishes, kitchen tools, and non-perishables heaped in piles or stuffed in cabinets. Add the fact that I’ve earned a lot of free products as a Pampered Chef consultant, and we were scrambling for places to put things. Judah and I wanted some shelving units that were just the right shape and size and were not expensive. Fortunately, we have three important factors all working in our favor:

1) Judah is very good at building things.
2) Pallet furniture is very popular these days.
3) Judah has access to free pallets.

So he made these.

Here are three things that I learned while making these shelves:

1) My husband is incredibly innovative and resourceful. Really, I am amazed at how he designed and built shelves with limited tools and wood that wasn’t the best quality. And somehow, they still turned out very nicely. Thanks to his ingenuity, we have custom shelves that exactly fit our needs, completely free. Also, it was really fun to help him in the garage.

2) People who make pallet furniture on Pinterest can’t possibly be using real pallets. Pallets are not that nice. The wood is warped, cracked, bent, and full of nails. How do they get their “rustic” pallet furniture to look so perfect? I’m not convinced. But that’s ok. We used real pallets and it looks rustic and imperfect and it was free, so I’m happy.

3) Every time I change one little thing in my house, it makes me want to redecorate the entire room. Seriously, I want to redecorate the kitchen. These rustic shelves make me want a country cottage-y kitchen. Not ashamed. The need to endlessly decorate and redecorate is in my blood. And I’m totally on a roll now, because I want to redo the living room and the bedroom too. I love the challenge of redecorating on a limited (pretty much non-existent) budget. We'll see what happens...

P.S. I have a few more pallet projects for Judah, and several of my own craft projects, so watch out for some more DIY and crafting posts. We'll be away next week and I'll have limited time and internet access, so we'll see whether or not I can post something next week. Thanks for reading!