Saturday, June 9, 2012

Pallet Table

10:16 AM | Posted by SarahD | | Edit Post
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The Pallet Table



I have been working on this one, and if you are a Facebook fan you already had somewhat of a heads up on what this DIY is about. It is about PALLETS!!!! Yeah pallets, you know those hideous things that you see in the grocery store when they are unpacking all the new merchandise or around back of a local store? Those beat up, old, {did I mention hideous?} boards.
Now I have worked with pallet boards before, I know that they vary in size but they only vary between two sizes 3 1/2x40 and 5 1/5x40 and because I have had prior experience with pallet boards I have kind of mastered the art of pulling off the boards without them breaking and I will share this with you, my readers =) Now I will say this, this project isn't easy, but it is worth all of the work that is put into it. By work I mean blood, sweat and tears (from the blood haha!) Now another word of wisdom, when you are picking out pallets... There is something that you should look for. CODES!! yes, codes. Somewhere on the pallet printed/burned into it should be the letters HT and some numbers, you want these pallets because it means the pallet was Heat Treated as opposed to Chemically Treated...
Now as for what I did This is what I started with:

now the best way that I have found to go about taking the boards off... get a hammer, start at the side wedge the nail puller end in between the boards and pry them apart. IMPORTANT NOTE.. You should hear a popping sound, POPPING IS NOT THE SAME THING AS CRACKING! Lol Popping=Good Cracking=BAD! (once you hear the two different sounds you will know what I am talking about) and after you pried both nails off of the one side, move to the next (middle) and do the same thing and continue.
The start

And now time to sand them (and this is why you want to sand them)see the before and after pic? Yeah that looks a lot better... that looks like something I would put in my living room...well getting there anyways. ;)
After the sanding is done, tack cloth comes into play, you want to use this to get all of the sawdust off of the boards before you stain them, You want to use a tact cloth because... well it has a tacky feeling to it so it grabs EVERYTHING that SHOULDN'T BE THERE. 




after that, depending on what you are doing either painting or staining the boards, if you are painting go ahead and start painting (art deco and apple barrel acrylics work great {or Krylon ;) } if you are staining them you will have to Pre-treat the boards, (awww really?!) yes pre-treat because these are old boards you are working with, so the pre-treat kind of brings a little bit of life to them by making them ready for the stain (makes the stain absorb into the boards more). Now keep in mind when you get to this point, make sure that you have enough time to move onto the staining because you only 2 hours after you put the pre-treat on to stain the boards. I will usually let the pre-treat soak in for about 15 to 20 min. then after it has soaked in a bit, time to move onto staining I stained the boards with a Dark Walnut/Jacobean mixture {Minwax} so it was extremely dark (which was exactly what I wanted).

let the stain absorb into the boards for about 15 min. Wipe off the stain and if you want it darker, do this over again, I stopped with two coats of stain and here is what it looked like.



Now, time for the moulding and attaching these boards all together, in my previous post, I mentioned that my Dad is a master carpenter ;) soooo guess where I went :) that's right, over to Mom and Dad's and here is what we did, we cut out a 16x39 inch piece of plywood and he made the moulding for me we cut it to size at 45 degree angles and then took a staple gun to all of it.


=) POWER TOOLS (= here are the pics I took while we were doing all of this (sorry if the pics are bad.. so is my phone haha! it has been dropped more times than I've had a birthday)

Now that the fun stuff is done, time to paint the moulding, now what I used was a sponge brush from my go to place (wally world!) and art deco paints (black and metallic gold) now to make this process go a little faster I dry brushed it {Dry Brushing is putting very little paint on the brush and painting it with as little paint as possible so it dries faster} I did this twice... Then, after this was done it is time to use the metallic gold paint to get it into the cracks, dings and where the moulding pieces met.  Here is how I did it
{dry brush again} now make sure that you have a rag/old towel next to you while you are doing this because you want to be able to wipe off the paint, you are using this gold as an "antiquing" technique and you don't want it all gold, you want to see the gold when the light hits it at certain angles, or see it in the dings/cracks and a side note… you will get messy but how it looks out weights the messiness (plus the paint comes off with warm soap and water)  now I also used the same technique on the table legs here is what it looked like. Now, time to attach the legs with wood glue and a nail gun ;)

and here is the final piece I hope you all enjoyed the tutorial!









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