Give Me B-A-S-E

This past weekend, Eric's family popped in for a quick two day visit on their way back home to North Carolina. It was a very relaxed visit, but was lots of fun!  Eric's brother and sister-in-law were quick to ask about why we had pallet boards chillin' on our deck out back.  We told them about our ideas to build a table (preferably a coffee table).  The next day, Dawn (Eric's sis-in-law) and I got busy tearing apart pallets.  Whoever says women can't be handy, clearly hasn't seen the Williams sisters.  I'm pretty sure our arms looked as good as Popeye's after eating spinach when it was all said and done.  For anyone looking to tear apart pallets, let me give you some tips on how to take out the nails and pry off each board without splitting it.

Pallet Board Removal Tips:

1. Use a hammer and a thin pry bar (it's easier to have one person with the pry bar and the other person with the hammer, however it can be done alone if you don't have another helper).

2. The pallet boards are attached in three places (sometimes four depending on the pallet)--top, middle, bottom.

3. Use your hammer to pound out the top portion of a board just enough to get your pry bar in there.  If you can use your pry bar to pull out/free the top portion of the board from the pallet base, that's great.  If not, keep pounding with the hammer on that section until it comes loose.

4. Once a section (ex: the top of a board is loose, but the middle and bottom of that board are still attached) of the board is loose from the base, pound the board back in to the base so that you can remove the nails (they will most of the time stick out for easy removal).  We learned this the hard way--the first couple of pallets we weren't removing the nails this way and were just hammering the boards until they were completely loose with nails still in them.  When we did this, the nail heads were getting stuck inside of the boards and making it VERY difficult to remove them.

5.  To avoid splitting the boards while pounding, try to hammer close to where each board is attached to the base instead of pounding smack dab in the middle of the board.  We discovered that once the pry bar was in between the base and the board, we would pound nearest where the pry bar was located on the underside of the pallet.  Dawn would try to pry the board back while I hammered in each corner of the board.

Hopefully those tips make sense.  It would've been easier to explain them with pictures, but silly me didn't think to take pictures of each step while doing it.

We took apart three pallets and had this pile of boards to show for it.

We were never so happy to see these boards free from their base!  I am SO grateful to have such an awesome sister-in-law who is willing to tackle projects with me---and who shared in my grunting while trying to get apart these crazy boards.

Now to the reason why we tore apart these pallets.  Eric and I have had this coffee table for around 5 years.

It has water stains on it and it's legs are completely unstable.  You can't tell from the above picture, but you can sort of see from these pictures that the frame is completely falling apart.

If anyone is overdue for a new coffee table, it's us.  So on Saturday we began working on sanding down the pallet boards and building the base of our future coffee table.  We decided that we were going to use the base of the pallet boards for the base of our table.  Makes sense, right?!  Here's a picture of Eric sanding down one of the base boards.

After the base boards had been sanded, Eric trimmed the ends of the boards to make sure that we were working with perfectly straight edges.  

We then laid out the boards to decide how wide we wanted our table.

Then Eric got busy screwing the boards together.

We decided to go with a herringbone pattern for the top of the table, so we not only needed a middle board for support, but we also needed a board there to nail into.  Eric measured to find the middle of the table and screwed in the last board.

And here folks, we have a base for our coffee table!  Phase 1 is complete!

The next step was sanding all of the boards that we planned on using for the top of the table.  Here's a lovely snapshot of me sanding one of the boards.

We actually already have the whole top of the table done, but I'm going to make you wait until our next post to see it.  :)  Tonight we plan on framing in the top of the table.  Hopefully we'll be back with a post tomorrow to reveal our table to you!  Cross your fingers!

What did you get into this past weekend?  Did it involve lots of sanding?  My wrist still hurts from all of the sanding I did last night! Ahhhh!