One of the big drivers for us to move to #buslife is to minimalise our lifestyle and our earth footprint. So it’s really important to us during our build to find materials and way’s of building that involve as much re-use, re-purposing, re-cycling and up-cycling – so of course – PALLET’S!!!
We haven’t paid for a pallet yet, in fact we’ve found that in most cases you are doing people a favour by getting rid of them.
We developed quite a process to turn them into useable timber, and for the most part, we’ll be using the pallet slats for creating the ceiling lining boards, and maybe for the walls as well.
The process starts by cutting the edges off to remove the edge “glut” piece. We found cutting it off worked far better than trying to pry it off, because the timber is old and dry, it split easily where the nails were, especially as it’s at the end of the slat – cutting it off leaves only the middle “glut” to be pried off. It’s also been great to have the kids helping with the process – some cutting, some prying, some de-nailing etc. etc.
Once they’re all pried off and de-nailed, we’ll then be running thru the thicknesser we got of Gumtree for $150 (bargain) to get a uniform thickness, then buzzing the edges and finally routing a rebate to create a ship-lap profile, cos it’s a bit more forgiving than a t&g when using boards that are not completely straight 😉
I’ve always been mindful of the economic reasons for doing things like re-using pallet’s, and how there is a balance between the time it takes x the value you put on your time v the cost of the buying what you need new. If you calculate this for our pallet process, there is no-way it works out cheaper to use pallets. When I did this calculation, I then considered the extreme alternative of “what if the difference of using pallets, meant that there is a healthy planet for my grandkids to grow up on” and when considering that, I realise that the “cost” of the extra time FAR outweighs the “price” of buying new stuff if it helps create a healthier planet!
To put that in perspective – I know that the simple instance of us using pallets is a mere drop in the ocean when it comes to creating a healthier planet, but the ocean is made up of drops right??