Building a Tiny House out of Wood Pallets
The tiny house is on the rise! As the trend of tiny homes continues, wood pallets have been a valuable resource for the avid upcycler endeavoring to construct a miniature house.
Kevin Bentley of Georgia built a 12′ by 12′ cabin made entirely of free upcycled pallet wood. It is a prime example of how versatile and useable the reclaimed wood from shipping pallets can be. Anyone looking to take advantage of the savings that pallets have to offer when building a home would be wise to explore various floorplans available online that lay out for you step-by-step just exactly how to go about turning raw lumber from wooden shipping pallets into a miniature home you built yourself at nearly zero cost.
It truly is remarkable the extent to which ordinary scrap wood can be converted in conjunction with other raw materials with just a little hard work into a truly beautiful petite dwelling. Your domicile can be built for virtually nothing but still look incredible once you finish it and add the finishing touches. The free wood you can get from pallets includes a small variety, including soft cedar, oak, and hickory. You can transform these raw materials any number of ways by simply sanding them and applying a stain or clear-coat, or even painting the planks or adding an exotic wood veneer to them. Style is versatile when you utilize the raw planks any number of ways to suit your needs.
There are a variety of woods you’ll find when reclaiming wood from used pallets. Different woods have different properties and characteristics. Certain woods lend themselves well to being used for the construction of wooden pallets more than others, and therefore are abundantly available to be reclaimed after the pallets have served their purpose, whereas most other wood varieties would scant be seen among the planks of unfinished raw transport material. If you find the letters MB anywhere on the pallets, make sure you wash them thoroughly before working with them as the MB stands for Methyl Bromide, which is a pesticide used to treat some wood used for building shipping pallets.
I-BEAM has made easy to follow plans available for constructing a home using just 80 wood pallets and about $500 worth of extra materials. The plans grew out of efforts to find ways to effectively and affordably house refugees in Somalia, where 60 pallets were nailed together to make an 83 square foot emergency shelter. The structure has proved an inexpensive method of providing shelter to people who have been affected by disasters both natural and man-made.
With the addition of concrete and plaster, insulation, and other home fixtures, one can create durable and efficient long-term housing affordably in times of duress or even just for the enjoyment of being efficient.
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