THEOEHT
Active member
Our community has been working on building with primarily free scavenged materials. We've been building an 8x8 shitter almost entirely out of used pallets and scrap lumber thrown out by a few local hardware stores as well as roofing metal from a collapsed wood shed a neighbor wanted removed. it's almost complete, the only thing left to do is the roof and although it looks a bit ramshackle, its incredibly sturdy. we spent 36 dollars on some abs plywood for the floor and 40 on screws and 10 foot 2x4s for rafters. in perspective, if all the lumber was new we would have spent at least $500 on 2x4s, siding, flooring and roofing metal.
We made the floor out of 4 pallets nailed together. we leveled the surface and set the floor on some concrete pavers we had laying around. we put 2 4'x8' sheets of osb over the pallets and trimmed off the excess. the floor's a little bit low to the ground which could cause rotting so down the road we might need to use jacks to lift the structure and put some larger cinder blocks underneath. most of the pallets we found had some broken/rotted slats and others had broken 2x4s so we used a hammer and pry bar to take good slats off of shitty pallets and put them on nicer pallets.
for the walls, we set 2 pallets side by side, nailed the studs together and screwed 2x4s on the bottom for base plates. we then screwed the base plate to the floor. for the front wall and door, we cut a large pallet in half for either side of the wall and used a long narrow pallet with hinges on it for the door. at this point we used a bunch of slates from other pallets as siding between the existing slats.
the first layer of walls was only 4.5 feet tall so we put another layer of palltes obove those. we used 2x4s interlocking over the bottom walls to join the walls together, built the top walls the same way as the bottom walls with base plates underneath which we connected to to top plates of the bottom walls.we decided to make a skillion(mono-pitched) roof which means the the roof is higher on one side than the other. we made the right wall a full 2 pallets tall, the left wall 1.5 pallets tall, the back wall is raked, shorter on the left side getting taller towards the left side. we took 2 narrow pallets and modified them to make the the right width for the from wall and then put a top plate over the front wall to make a door frame.
We made the floor out of 4 pallets nailed together. we leveled the surface and set the floor on some concrete pavers we had laying around. we put 2 4'x8' sheets of osb over the pallets and trimmed off the excess. the floor's a little bit low to the ground which could cause rotting so down the road we might need to use jacks to lift the structure and put some larger cinder blocks underneath. most of the pallets we found had some broken/rotted slats and others had broken 2x4s so we used a hammer and pry bar to take good slats off of shitty pallets and put them on nicer pallets.
for the walls, we set 2 pallets side by side, nailed the studs together and screwed 2x4s on the bottom for base plates. we then screwed the base plate to the floor. for the front wall and door, we cut a large pallet in half for either side of the wall and used a long narrow pallet with hinges on it for the door. at this point we used a bunch of slates from other pallets as siding between the existing slats.
the first layer of walls was only 4.5 feet tall so we put another layer of palltes obove those. we used 2x4s interlocking over the bottom walls to join the walls together, built the top walls the same way as the bottom walls with base plates underneath which we connected to to top plates of the bottom walls.we decided to make a skillion(mono-pitched) roof which means the the roof is higher on one side than the other. we made the right wall a full 2 pallets tall, the left wall 1.5 pallets tall, the back wall is raked, shorter on the left side getting taller towards the left side. we took 2 narrow pallets and modified them to make the the right width for the from wall and then put a top plate over the front wall to make a door frame.