DIY Pallet Coffee Table

Ok, so I found a cool idea on Pinterest for a DIY pallet coffee table. Our current coffee table had glass inserts on top, and somehow one of them cracked and broke. We needed a new table, & I asked Chad to let me try this DIY one instead of spending a ton of money on a new one.

This is the link to the website I found this project at. Here is what the original poster's coffee table came out like.

I thought it was super cute, and it's practically free. So first step, we needed some pallets. Luckily, Chad's work has pallets galore. So we shoved 5 of them in the back of my SUV and brought them home.

The first step was to take the boards off of them. I didn't take a real "before" picture, but everyone knows what pallets look like. They're a frame of 3 2x4's with a couple support planks (their dimensions vary) on the bottom, and an assorted number of planks across the top with gaps between them. Our first attempt was to simply hammer the planks off of the 2x4's. This resulted in a couple splintered boards. The nails stayed in the 2x4's and the planks split. So then we tried laying down one of the extra pallets, and flipping the pallet we were working on upside down on top of it. We took one of the broken planks, set it against the 2x4 on top of the plank we were trying to hammer off, and hammered the scrap wood. This distributed the pressure more evenly, and saved most of the planks we did this to. (I should have taken pictures of these steps.) The 2nd pallet we worked on was slightly larger than the first, and was just enough wider than the frame we were wanting to use, that we just took a skill saw to it and sawed the planks off of the ends, saving us from hammering everything but the middle. (Again, I should have taken pictures.) As a side note, it took 3 pallets to get enough usable boards because so many splintered trying to remove them, or were already missing chunks, were too warped, etc.

So once we got all the planks removed from the frames, the next step was to set the planks side by side (as opposed to spaced out, as they were originally), and hammer them back in place.

This is the two halves of our table (bottom and top), with the planks set in their new positions.

The excess frame will be sawed off, and the extra support planks on the underside of the frame will be removed as well.

Thank goodness for hubby & his drill. :)

So once the planks were screwed down, and the excess sawed off, next came sanding and staining. I was gung-ho to hand sand the whole thing, but realizing how rough some of the boards were, we invested in an electric pad sander, only around $30 at Menard's. It took me a couple days to get everything sanded down to where I was satisfied. Then came the stain. We went with a cherry color, as we didn't want something super dark or super light. The wood soaks up the stain, though, so it took a whole quart to stain both top & bottom.

This is the top half with its first coat of stain. I haven't taken any pictures recently, but the bottom half still needs its second coat, and then we're going to do two coats of a matte polyurethane on it as well. After that, we just need to screw some legs on (the legs are pieces of the excess frame that was sawed off earlier, cut to whatever height you want the table to be), and the two halves need screwed together as well. More pictures will come when the project is finished. :)

To give you an idea of the cost of this project, we invested in a $30 sander (not a total waste, as it will certainly get used in the future), an $8 quart of stain, an $8 quart of polyurethane, a couple of $0.89 paintbrushes, and a $3 box of screws.