Recycling Ideas Part 2

Hi All,

Welcome to Part 2 of my recycling ideas, as I mentioned before some are my ideas and some are "borrowed", here is one I came up with and just finished!

In the past 6 months or so i've loved the idea and keenly watched new and impressive ideas for using old timber pallets, as you would have seen on an older article I, with the help of my children, turned an old timber pallet into a garden feature.

Sadly a week of over 40 degree days killed my plants in there but once we get over the heat I'm going to replant this with fresh plants!

The new idea was to turn one of the timber pallets which had a flat plywood top into a mini table on wheels with the top turned into a chalkboard!

So, we found these pallets at the local carpet shop. I bought a new orbital sander and thought this would be perfect to test out on.

I gave the whole pallet a good sanding with some grade 60 sand paper, curved off all the edges and removed any splinter causing areas.

Adding castor wheels at the bottom gives the ability to move it around easier, these ones also have brakes so if you don't want it to be moved or children moving it while using it just flick it into lock.

This design was made purely to be placed in a child care centre, I wanted to come up with something that children could easily sit at and play, or put their legs under if they want.

I was able to buy a litre of black chalkboard paint from our local Bunnings for approx $15, I applied two coats to the top and has come up a treat!

For the sides and bottoms we decided to go with left over Pink paint the centre had left over, as their main colour for the centre is Pink we thought this would be fitting. The paint left over was a high gloss which was previously used on the doors, two coats of this and the pink really came out nice and shiny.

That's it, as simple as that. Now, not all pallets come with a plywood top, these are rare so if you see one grab it! If not Plywood isn't that expensive so if you find a good pallet you can easily fit a plywood top to it for added height.

Now the finishing product, Personally I'm really happy with the way this came out and reckon it looks awesome, from all reports the kids loved using it also with big chunky pieces of chalk! For child safety reasons I'm not allowed to show the kids using it but heres a photo of the finished product.

This is also easy enough to enlist the help of your kids just get them to wear some gloves until after the pallet has been fully sanded, choose a colour or multiple colours and paint away! The blackboard paint also comes as a green also.

Please try this at home, took me a couple of nights to do and all you need is the pallet, castor wheels, sander (my orbital worked really well), Chalkboard Paint and another Paint for the sides and bottom.