Tiny Free House

I took the day off from work we took a half-day trip up the the farm today. I spent a few hours working on the Tiny Free House, shooting some photos and video. I hope this is the beginning of a series of trips that will get me a lot closer to completing the Tiny Free House. Here are a few of the videos I shot.

How to take apart pallets

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I was unloading the truck today and got a better look at some pallets I recently picked up. They had been posted on craigslist and set beside a dumpster. I business giving them away was a place that sells wine and several of the pallets were extremely heavy duty. I guess that makes sense; wine is really heavy and you wouldn’t want the pallet to fall apart on you. There were also some good standard pallets. This picture shows the variety of pallets pretty well… they really is so much diversity.

The pallet on the left is the heavy duty pallet and will be dismantled and probably remade into cabinets and shelves. You can see it’s a 2-way pallet and lacks the fork lift fork notches like most standard pallets. This is great for me because I’ll be able to make good use of the solid 2x4s. The pallet on the right is a standard 48″ by 40″ 4-way pallet which will probably become part of the roof. It’s fairly light weight and should be strait enough. It’s got a little bow to it but that shouldn’t be too big of a problem.

Just a quick lesson in pallet quality. Julia spotted four pallets today while we were running errands. We swung around, asked if we could have them, tossed them in the back of the truck, and were off. When I unloaded them I noticed one of them wasn’t so good. The 2x4s were a bit too worn and there were lots of stains. I’ll probably take this one apart and see if any of the slats are usable. I think the 2×4 might be toast but once I get the slats off I’ll know for sure. Mostly I’m looking for rot or serious damage. The wood is definitely hardwood and the pallet is very heavy. Here’s the ‘bad’ pallet:

Below is an example of a very usable pallet from the same load. It’s a standard 40′ by 48′ pallet, sturdy, unstained, not too weathered, and fairly light weight. I suspect the wood is fir. This is the kind of pallet that makes building easy. Soft wood is much easier to work with and when the pallets are in good condition and a standard size they need very little preparation before they can become part of a wall, floor, or roof.

I’ll just screw 2x4s onto the open ends of this one and it will be good to go. I plan to do a lot of this kind of work this week so I can arrive at the farm the next time with a full load of prepared pallets. It will make the construction go much faster.