As much as i love the idea of building with pallets, it takes so much deconstruction. It always seems like you are basically just salvaging wood. But
Photo Credit: My Repurposed Life
when i saw this project on My Repurposed Life website and knew I had a fence section just sitting around… I had to try it.
When Gail made this project, she had some pretty amazing raw material: genuine old stockade fence she got from a friend. It’s very vintage material and the results are rustic fantastic!
My version included not even a whole 8 foot section of cypress fencing i purchased about a year ago from a sawmill close by. I had just enough fence section make an almost identical sized piece: 7 pickets wide by 4 pickets deep.
Just a plain ol fence section
I started by just cutting the cross pieces: Two 4 picket sections and had the final 7 picket section left over. I decided i would use the middle support as the bottom of my shelf unit so i cut all the pickets off just below that middle 1 x 6.
I stood my pieces up to see how they would line up. In order for the 90 degree angles to meet tightly, i had to notch the 1×6 on each short side where it met up with the long side. I put a couple nails in just to hold it together, but the nails would not be strong enough for the finished project. I had the perfect metal “L” brackets in the garage and used those on each of the 4 corners where the 1×6 met. Non only did they add a lot of rigidity, they pulled all the pieces square.
Finished Project
At this point all i needed to do was cut the shelving pieces to size. I had to remove the 1 x 6 from the pickets, and then cut each one to the proper length to span across. Then I just layed them across the existing 1×6 supports. The pickets on my fence were only 3/8ths inch slats, so beefing that up to 3/4 would make it a really strong shelf, but with a 2 foot span, these are working fine for now.
While i had the material to make a third middle shelf, I decided to wait on that because I didn’t want to lose the option of putting something taller on the bottom shelf.
I decided this picket shelf would be perfect to showcase some of my hypertufa pieces. I gathered a few of them and set them up! Want to see more project ideas? Check out my Pinterest board.Follow Barbara’s board Cool Projects on Pinterest.
