Our Personal Painted Pallet

So, everyone's got one right? It seems the whole DIY/Blogging culture has embraced pallets as the perfect source for building and decorating. To be honest I'm not a big fan of making furniture out of pallets. Most of the ones I've seen are dirty, broken, full of nail holes, etc. They always seem like way more work than they're worth. Frankly, I wonder where people are getting all of these pristine looking pallets I see online.

That being said my wife ran across a piece of art that someone had made (sorry, but we lost the link) that we both thought was really nice. It was a pallet that someone had painted and hung on the wall, and it looked pretty darn cool. Soon after we saw it I ran across an adorable little pallet at work that was too small to be any good so I snapped it right up.

All I had to do was pull these feet off and it was ready to go!

Look at that. I couldn't believe my luck on this pallet. It's one of those pristine ones!

My wife set about painting it (she's the real artist, I just pretend sometimes and she's nice enough to indulge me). The quote is from Inevitable by Anberlin.

It sat on top of our dresser for a while.



Lookit that adorable wittle owl!

 Once we were ready to hang it, I grabbed some strong wire and some eye-hooks. I screwed the eye-hooks into the support pieces opposite of each other and strung the wire through them.



Grayson helped color the back.

 We glued felt onto the bottom of the support pieces so they wouldn't scuff up the wall

I tried looking up how to hang a pallet, but only found one or two links actually dealing with hanging it as artwork (most of the results were for creating a pallet wall which is cool but just slightly different). The one I did find (here) talked about using a special bracket so it would be, you know, really safe.

I didn't go that route.

As far as pallets go ours was pretty small, so I wasn't too worried. I've seen pictures bigger than it. I happened to have some pretty big nails in my tool box and I figured one of them should be more than strong enough to hold it so long as I made sure to nail it into a stud. To find the stud I knocked along the wall until it didn't sound hollow. Then I hammered the nail in.

On about the third tap the nail sunk deep. I had definitely missed the stud.

I knocked on the wall and discovered that the wall sounded even less hollow about 4-5 inches to the right. So I hammered the nail in there. And missed again.

At this point I thought there had to be a way to figure out where this thing was that didn't involve nailing more holes into the wall or buying a stud finder. I know my studs are 16" on center so all I had to do was find one stud and I could measure from there. I did a quick internet search that revealed that I was completely overlooking the obvious. Directly below where I was hammering was an outlet. Outlets are always attached to studs so all I had to do was remove the outlet cover to see which side the stud was on. Lo and behold that stud was right in between the two nail holes I had made. I nailed it in, hung the pallet, and presto changeo, WALL ART!

What do you think?