Pallet walls

The idea for the pallets walls,of course, came from the internet. The building in the left top corner of the first picture was our trail run with building walls from free pallets. It has been standing for over a year now, so I guess we did it right! The trick that was learned from the first try was that the pallets needed to be as close to the same size as possible. That made the whole process so much easier. It is not easy. It is probably easier to frame the walls with studs....but pallets are free ( or mostly free anyway)

This first group of pallets we did end up paying $2  pallet for. They came from a neighbor and were fairly uniform in size. They were large enough to make 6 inch exterior walls, which we really wanted at least on the North size of the house. 

The process is fairly straight forward, line up the pallets, put a nailer board in between and on the sides.

The white board is what we used to nail them together.

Then of course came standing them up and bracing with 2x4's while we are still building. Chris did end up putting a treated piece of wood on the concrete to attach to the concrete. He did not want there to be an issue with moisture getting into the wood that is against the concrete. He then drilled into the concrete and screwed the whole thing down.

The first section of the wall.

The window that will go into the wall just had to be framed the traditional way. We were able to make the length work out with the placement of the window to get four sections of pallets on the end. The other end will not have a window so we may have to fill in with traditional framing if Chris can not make the layout work for five sections of pallets.

The back section of the house. These pallets we were able to find for free. There is a larger window that helped us equal out the spacing of pallets. On the end of the run that is currently up there will e a back door. Alas, we ran out of pallets that were the same size so we are currently waiting on more. The ceiling joists are starting to go up in the mean time.