This isn't wildly difficult, living in a somewhat large-ish city, as many businesses have loads of pallets they can't wait for you to take off their hands, also being close to the ocean and various forests gives me access to driftwood and fallen trees, which is neat. But as previously mentioned, its pretty difficult to get materials from their respective homes to my respectable one (at least, I think it's respectable...)
I say this all as a preface to the story I am about to tell, which I'm telling as a preface to the pictures I'm going to post about a project I undertook a few months back, mainly because I found the pictures on my computer and thought I'd do a post about it.
So, I have a friend. Surprising I know. In reality I actually have a couple, but that's not the story. This story starts with the knowledge that this particular friend is currently pursuing higher learning, or Post-Secondary Education, if you will. As a result of this pursuit he, like many of us, isn't exactly loaded. To use a fairly archaic saying, his coffers are dry (I don't normally drop medieval turn of phrase, but my brother, who is an excellent musician, whom I'm quite sure you'll hear about on here soon enough, and even more sure you'll hear on the radio or through your fancy iPhones someday, used that particular phrase in a song, and I thought it sounded cool, so I wanted to try and casually drop it somewhere. Done.)
Anyway, because of this financial drought, my friend slept on a mattress on the floor, a college cliché which was normally fine, at least until you wanted to seem impressive. And when I say 'wanted to seem impressive' what I mean is 'want to impress a girl'. Which was the case here. Long story short, he had a female visiting him last minute, which gave him no money and 2 days to get some sort of bed-type-structure going on, which at the time seemed like a very important thing.
Luckily for him, while walking to a nearby arcade (Yes, I'm 24 and go to an arcade on a regular enough basis that I know the employee's, also I am single. Weird.) we noticed an awkwardly large pallet. A pallet so large, in fact, that with a little elbow grease, it could quite adequately hold a bed. Less lucky for him was the fact that this meant it weighed an obscene amount. And was a good 15 minutes from my house. And we still had no vehicle.
(It looked like this, hopefully the overstuffed LayZboy you can kind of see in the background gives an idea of scale)
What we DID have, was tons of shopping carts abandoned in the blocks surrounding my house (I live unfortunately close to a Walmart). So the logical solution, for us at least, was wait until 3am, and head back with a shopping cart to somehow coax this pallet home. And since we were already making the trip, why not throw on as much pallets and random wood as we could stack? Because just do it, thats why not! or something. What I'm trying to say, is we did that thing I just described.
Also, for the record, we did it at 3am so we could just go down the middle of the street without worrying about traffic, which worked out well. The only car we did see was an officer of the law, who promptly flicked on his lights. After pulling our 'vehicle' over to the side of the road he started asking us the obvious questions, like "Why are you pushing an 8 foot pile of wood down the middle of the street on a shopping cart at 3am?" and "Who did you steal this stuff from?" After explaining the nature of the wood, that it was free, and that we genuinely believed doing at 3am was the smart thing to do (almost all of which is true!) he somewhat sceptically told us to hurry it up and went on his way. Luckily, this was the only real hiccup we had in 'Operation Get A Big Pallet Home' (I'm working on coming up with more creative operation names).
Now the preamble to this project has taken WAY longer than I intended, so for those of you still around, here's some pictures of the project itself. First I cut down the sides, because the original pallet was a big square, and most beds aren't...
Then I removed the sides that had been cut off, and pulled the cut ends of the 'slats' from the 2x4's running down each side, which were then lovingly re-inserted into the now rectangular bed frame.
Then I randomly threw legs where ever seemed convenient. I even measured so they were mostly the same height!
Also, the bits'o'2x4 jutting off the one end are to add a headboard, which my friend made from some of the wood we salvaged and some old bed sheets from the thrift store, which you can see below!
Then, he put mattresses on, and made the bed. At this point I felt my work was done, because I built the thing, so I let him make the bed alone, but after it looked like this:
So, you know, now he has a bed, which was free, and suitably impressive. It just goes to show that you don't always need money, sometimes you can get by with some hard work, a little ingenuity, and a friend who does all the building for you!
Stay Alert at the Wheel Everyone;
Jeff
And if you get a friend with hard work and ingenuity, you don't have to do a single thing! Well, that solves MY life.
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