Last week I talked about how to live simply and decrease your carbon footprint living in a tiny house. Even better than buying a tiny house is making your own, and Michael Janzen is blazing a trail with his free tiny pallet house. Not only is his house made out of recycled shipping pallets, it isn’t costing him anything to build. And lucky for us, he’s sharing his plans so you too can build your own tiny free house.
You can save money, sharpen your DIY skills, and further decrease your environmental impact by following Janzen’s example of building a free pallet house.
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Keep pallets out of landfills
Here are some disturbing statistics about shipping pallets:
- Approximately 40% of all hardwood harvested in the U.S. is for making shipping pallets
- About two-thirds of pallets are used only once before being thrown out
- 1/4 of all wood in landfills is from used pallets
You can help prevent deforestation and keep pallets out of landfills by finding creative alternative uses for them, like building a house. Pallets can be found everywhere. Once you start looking for them, you’ll see them scattered all over your town or city.
Contact a local warehouse, supermarket, or any business that receives large shipments, and get permission to pick up their used pallets. Most companies are happy to give their pallets away.
Plans for a free pallet house
Janzen has made plans for building a free pallet house available on his website. These plans are a guide for building what he calls a disaster preparedness and emergency shelter. Janzen says:
As hurricane Gustav plowed across Cuba headed for the gulf coast of the United States memories of Katrina and the potential displacement of thousands got me thinking. I wanted to do something to help. It occurred to me that someone else might find what I now about building with shipping pallets useful in the coming weeks and months.
With some creativity, you may find that shipping pallets can be reappropriated in other ways to build your own free tiny house. For example, I have a friend that has disassembled shipping pallets and used the wood to build roof trusses for his straw bale building.
Ultimately, you can help prevent deforestation and keep pallets out of landfills by using them to build creative housing.
Think tiny and free!
(Image credit: flickr via KGBKitchen)
why not just live in a tent
Reclaimed wood? If the shoe fits… Wooden Palettes reused for this tiny little eye catch. Why not?
From Page: “I spent the last two days working in the Tiny Free House and got the other window lowered about 8 inches to clear the eaves and finished adding pallet boards to the roof. It was very slow going screwing all those boards to the trusses. I used an extension ladder from the outside for the lower boards and did the peak from the inside by coming up through the framing.
My next step is to cover the roof with roofing felt to protect the house from the rain and start on the siding on my next trip… unless my father-in-law scores form scrap sheet metal for me. He mentioned he knew a couple guys with sheet metal shops that often have shingle size scrap pieces of metal. Seems to me some galvanized scrap sheet metal would make some very nice shingles… nicer than #10 cans and still very free.”
This is a pretty good idea, but an even better use is to find a company that ships a lot of stuff…get the pallets from someone who receives a bunch of stuff, pickup their pallets and then recycle them by giving or selling them back to a company that needs them….every pallet that you recycle like this, may be directly responsible for preventing a new pallet from being made….
I work with pallets and I can tell you that you really can’t use the things more than once safely, maybe twice. They take quite a beating and you don’t want one breaking at an inopportune time. What you should really back is replacing as many as possible with synthetic pallets.
alot of electrical supply house and warehouses wouldnt mind to hand out some pallets. just ask if you take some off there hands and i bet they would be cool with it.
I just finished a goat shed. I was lucky enough to find four 8ft pallets. I used 3 for 3 walls and a normal size pallet on the 4th wall to leave a space for the door. I am using the 4th 8ft pallet as part of the goat’s climbing gym.
I attached the pallets to treated landscape timbers to keep the pallets up off the ground. On the outside I put tin and the roof is clear plastic roofing so it’s not too dark inside.
This is a great house for my goats but it would work well for a chicken coop, Dog house etc. Pallets are a great way to build. Not only did I save money, it took about an hour to do all the framing needed.
I’ll be using pallets again!
I don’t want to be a party-pooper & I want to do the right thing by recycling etc., but…I’ve heard that many pallets are contaminated by toxic materials originally stored/shipped on them. This is also a very good reason not to burn pallets. ~ jack at rainbarrel.ca