101 uses for a pallet? (we have rather a lot!)

Esther.D

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Jan 3, 2003
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We ordered a load of old pallets delivered from a local building centre to use as firewood as our house is heated by a multi-fuel stove and range and they burn pallets very well (and wood is decidedly scarce up here!)

Not bad for £30 :D (they are free if you collect them, the £30 covered delivery and loading/unloading but saved us hundreds of trailer journeys) I don't think we'll need anymore for quite a while....
(they are stacked 5 or 6 deep all along the back of the house, and you can just see a pile off shot to the left as well - we have now piled most of them behind the house since we took this pic).

DSC02262.jpg



We also use them for temporary gates, take them apart and have built a cold frame, a hen house and a goat shelter, use them as duck boards where it is muddy (obviously not for the horses, but to keep us and the chickens and goats dry and out of the mud they work well) etc
 
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:eek: I felt exhausted just thinking about moving that pile!!!

Many years ago my OH built me a very fine 12 x 12 stable out of pallets - only had to buy the main structure timber - spent hours taking them all apart and then double lining the frame!

But we were both young and madly in love then - he would do anything for me:D:D Think he'd tell me to go take a hike if I asked him to build me one like that again:rolleyes:
 
I like the ones that have the boards close together, no gaps.
Cross country jumps, gates, duck boards, I could think of quite a few other uses but they would involve OH, oh well.
 
Nothing as fancy as some of the ideas, but the ones with the wide gaps are great for hanging rugs over for drying!

It looks a huge pile Esther, but bet you'll get through them quick enough in a stove, they'll be great for kindling! Do you keep your stove going all night? Our central heating works off our stove, we stoke it up and turn it right down, burns all night, it's great! Lots of trees where we are so it's free to run too, thankfully.
 
thank goodness you dont have house proud neighbours or it would be war!

we could use some for our stove as well but i'm not sure i want quite so many.
 
that's amazing and such a good recycling idea! I wish I could help but we only use them to store hay on and build stables with!

Where you live looks great btw... I can't wait till I earn some more money to buy somewhere that's not in the middle of a council estate on the wrong side of notts and derby!
 
One of the advantages of living in the middle of a field dandt :D Mind you in consideration of the nearest neighbours we do have (and to stop it looking like a scrap yard) we have stacked them all neatly now behind the house, the photo is of them when they had just been thrown down off the lorry.

They do make fantastic kindling, and then the big chunks in them burn like logs. We use approximately a pallet a day to run our stove in the living room, more if we have the range on in the kitchen as well, so they will begin to go down fairly rapidly. Only problem with it is that we cannot stoke it up and leave it with pallets, they burn through too quickly, but they do get the house lovely and toasty! We didn't expect quite so many, they said a truck load, we didn't expect them to be piled right up to the cab roof though :D Luckily we have the space to stack them.

shockblue - our house almost certainly cost less than yours in the middle of an estate, but you do have to move rather a way to get these kinds of prices!
 
Esther, where did you get them from? We do have a wood burning boiler, currently using wood pellets, but it can burn wood and we have a yard where we could store them 'tidily' and then dismantle them and bring them down to the boiler to burn them.

What type of burner are you using?
 
We have a Franco Belge Montfort multifuel stove - http://www.sandpitsheatingcentre.co.uk/products/franco-belge-montfort-multifuel-stove/6/ in the living room and a cheap italian import range in the kitchen which I can't remember the make of.

We stack them as neatly as we can (we have no flat ground which causes a slight problem!) and then chop them into burnable chunks and planks with a circular saw and cut the planks down into stove sized bits with a bench saw (you can do it by hand but not with the quantity we have!).

They came from Lerwick Building Centre - we have a lot of pallets here as everything comes on them as freight on the boat, but its worth trying your local builders merchant. We could have picked them up for free but we can only manage 9 at a time in our small flatbed trailer so it made more sense to pay to get them delivered in bulk.
 
thanks esther, we have a wood burning stove in the sitting room and an outside wood burning boiler which does the radiators.

don't have the saws, but we could work that one out.

will see if it is possible to get similar here etc.
 
how about making a treehouse for the children, or a fort/ playhouse type of thing. also, a sledge for your ponies to pull, to help you do little jobs around the place? a veg garden fence with the more solid ones, solid side out, and you could hang planting trays from the inner frames?? and, i have a georgeous large footstool in my sitting room, which i made out of a big pallet, topped with an old foam mattress, with carved cabriole legs from a junk shop dressing table, and upholstered in a swanky fabric remnant.
 
OH ties a pallet to the back of the quad bike to level the school. Very cheap - much better than buying a proper doofer to do the job! Just have to watch the naughty cows, they nibbled through it a while back.........
 
Place looks fabulous, lol, apart from the pallets:p

Had a friend once who was the 'pallet king' he used to make all sorts from
garden furniture to decking with pallets;)

However, I have this feeling that based where you live it won't be too
long before you will be using them all keeping warm;):D
 
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