Cowboy Nursery-- Pallet shelf

 First thing is to scrounge yourself a pallet. I happen to live in a construction zone and see a few palettes lying around every time I leave the house. All palettes are not created equal. This palette is in excellent condition and the better shape it's in the easier it will be to rip apart.

Okay a typical pallet has a bottom and a top. The bottom has just a few slats of wood and the top has quite a few in order to hold whatever it was used to hold. I know, I know I am so technical. Flip the palette over so the top is face down. It should look similar to this. There should be around 4 slats of wood on this side.

Grab your hammer or pry bar and gently start removing the two slats of wood in the middle of the pallet. I say gently, but this is serious work. These things are meant to be sturdy. The goal is to remove the wood without it cracking and breaking because we will be re-positioning the wood  to transform this into a shelf. 

Now your pallet looks like this and you are probably pretty sweaty--well if you live in Texas and doing this in your garage you most definitely are!

This is what the end of your pallet looks like.

This is what the bottom of your shelf looks like! You removed at least two planks of wood; nail or screw one plank of wood to each end of the pallet. The wood won't need to be cut, just attached.

Now you will need to decide the size of your shelves. You can cut the palette directly in half and have two of the same size. For Mac's nursery we cut 3/4 and 1/4 so they would be varying sizes. Once you cut the pallet into two pieces all you will need to do is paint or stain. I am kinda terrified of saws and had the hubs do it for me. He used a skill saw and made three cuts total, took him 5 minutes or less.  Just cut the vertical pieces of wood between the slats running horizontally and viola you have 2 rustic pallet shelves! 

We stained our shelves and didn't take much care in it. We were going for a rustic uneven look.