We Built a Playhouse out of Pallet Wood

Free Pallet Wood

So back when my son was one I came upon a really cool realisation, you can get free wood. Pallet wood to be precise, most of the wood is the European size pallets which don’t really fit our UK lorries so they are offered for free to anyone who wants them. As companies have to pay commercial waste providers to get rid of them so they offer them for free.

If you want to find your own pallet wood just try your local industrial estate and don’t be shy just ask.

After finding out about this free wood I thought I would try to make a garden bench, which turned out pretty good.

The Design

Then my wife said why not make Reuben a playhouse. So there it was the challenge to make a playhouse of free pallet wood. Where to start, thankfully my job as a Senior Business Analyst means I know how to plan. So I set out firstly meauring Reuben. Mainly his height and his width, you know so he could actually fit in his new house.

I thought of the design, I decided on a simple design with a shallow roof, thankfully I was already pretty good at DIY and knew a shallow pitch roof was about 22 degrees, (boring yep but makes for a nice looking roof). Being a modular design the house is easy to move, basically all the sides and the roof are built independently of each other and bolt together for easy assembly and disassembly. Finally after it was almost ready to build my wife said “it needs to have a window” so I added a window.

The Play House Build

After deciding on the design and writing it down. My next challenge was to collect and dismantle the pallets, I had to collect around 15 pallets in total. As I only have a hatchback car it took a few trips. But a huge thank you to the companies who offered the pallets for free.

Once we had all the pallets dismantled it was on to the framing. Reuben was a little star in helping with the whole play house build, he just wanted to use real tools and get stuck in.