Wow, what a couple of days... I wanted to post yesterday but this pallet destruction/reconstruction malarkey is exhausting!
So this idea started about a year ago when I first got the house and was daydreaming about kitchen possibilities. The bank wanted a pretty sizeable deposit off me, so by the time I actually moved in there was no money left and daydreaming was all that could happen - and when you see some of the pictures of the kitchen you'll understand how depressing that was! Having a nice bedroom and living room is one thing, but your kitchen is where so much happens and it's soooo difficult to refrain from spending money you don't have on making it functional and looking nice. And like every other renovation project, there's 100 other jobs that need to be done before you can even contemplate cabinets and paint colours.
The current kitchen is basically a freestanding jobby not designed to be a kitchen. It's badly made, has no doors, and looks like something from a garage workshop that someone's just dumped a cheap chipboard worktop on. And just to give you a taster for the kitchen, here's a sneak peak from an upcoming post which shows the only part of the kitchen that did have doors - the old sink unit (which had no floor underneath it, it was literally sat on soil when I pulled it out!!). In case you couldn't work it out, it's the hideous white thing next to the nice new unit we made out of old shelves from the front room...
So I was daydreaming away about modular solutions which a) I could build cheaply and b) could be moved when I came to doing the important stuff like electrics, flooring and plastering etc. I desperately wanted something with doors on to store plates and pans in, but especially food, food was the priority.
I'd seen some cool pantry cabinets (or pantrabinets as I like to call them) on Google. They were chunky freestanding units with the type of doors that have shelves in, so there's a whole bunch of storage in there. I liked the look of these but it would take a fair amount of wood to build, and wood's expensive so that idea quickly went on the back burner. As much as I wanted a build project like this, putting it to the back of my head wasn't entirely difficult because we were about to start replumbing the whole house, and that kind of DIY is pretty much all consuming. Unfortunately it was full of lead piping which isn't particularly good for you, and when the pennies are few health and safety always needs to be first on the priorities list (I'll tell you about that one in another post, it was the sort of adventure that saw us enjoying some rain in the kitchen, and there's videos to show the carnage!).
Anyway, fast forward about 10 months and I'm wandering around a beautiful antique furniture store up in Sheffield with my father in law. I saw some amazing Welsh Dressers and changed my mind completely. By this point I'd done a lot of projects in the house, and sometimes we all have a dark moment where we think to ourselves 'I should just buy something, it'll be easier'.
Luckily I didn't have the cash(!) so that idea didn't last long, and a couple of months later here we are, right in the middle of my pallet adventures. I had no idea where the pallets would take me when I first got my hands on them, but I'm so glad they've bought me here!
So the decision was made; I'd make a Welsh Dresser style pantrabinet out of upcycled pallets, and it would be known as the Paltrabinet! And that would be the start of my pallet kitchen challenge.
The ultimate goal is to build all the kitchen units out of free pallets. We've already made a pretty stunning belfast sink unit for the bay window from old shelving in the front room, so I'm really excited to think we could have a whole new upcycled kitchen made from beautiful reclaimed wood, without spending a penny...
So this idea started about a year ago when I first got the house and was daydreaming about kitchen possibilities. The bank wanted a pretty sizeable deposit off me, so by the time I actually moved in there was no money left and daydreaming was all that could happen - and when you see some of the pictures of the kitchen you'll understand how depressing that was! Having a nice bedroom and living room is one thing, but your kitchen is where so much happens and it's soooo difficult to refrain from spending money you don't have on making it functional and looking nice. And like every other renovation project, there's 100 other jobs that need to be done before you can even contemplate cabinets and paint colours.
The current kitchen is basically a freestanding jobby not designed to be a kitchen. It's badly made, has no doors, and looks like something from a garage workshop that someone's just dumped a cheap chipboard worktop on. And just to give you a taster for the kitchen, here's a sneak peak from an upcoming post which shows the only part of the kitchen that did have doors - the old sink unit (which had no floor underneath it, it was literally sat on soil when I pulled it out!!). In case you couldn't work it out, it's the hideous white thing next to the nice new unit we made out of old shelves from the front room...
So I was daydreaming away about modular solutions which a) I could build cheaply and b) could be moved when I came to doing the important stuff like electrics, flooring and plastering etc. I desperately wanted something with doors on to store plates and pans in, but especially food, food was the priority.
I'd seen some cool pantry cabinets (or pantrabinets as I like to call them) on Google. They were chunky freestanding units with the type of doors that have shelves in, so there's a whole bunch of storage in there. I liked the look of these but it would take a fair amount of wood to build, and wood's expensive so that idea quickly went on the back burner. As much as I wanted a build project like this, putting it to the back of my head wasn't entirely difficult because we were about to start replumbing the whole house, and that kind of DIY is pretty much all consuming. Unfortunately it was full of lead piping which isn't particularly good for you, and when the pennies are few health and safety always needs to be first on the priorities list (I'll tell you about that one in another post, it was the sort of adventure that saw us enjoying some rain in the kitchen, and there's videos to show the carnage!).
Anyway, fast forward about 10 months and I'm wandering around a beautiful antique furniture store up in Sheffield with my father in law. I saw some amazing Welsh Dressers and changed my mind completely. By this point I'd done a lot of projects in the house, and sometimes we all have a dark moment where we think to ourselves 'I should just buy something, it'll be easier'.
Luckily I didn't have the cash(!) so that idea didn't last long, and a couple of months later here we are, right in the middle of my pallet adventures. I had no idea where the pallets would take me when I first got my hands on them, but I'm so glad they've bought me here!
So the decision was made; I'd make a Welsh Dresser style pantrabinet out of upcycled pallets, and it would be known as the Paltrabinet! And that would be the start of my pallet kitchen challenge.
The ultimate goal is to build all the kitchen units out of free pallets. We've already made a pretty stunning belfast sink unit for the bay window from old shelving in the front room, so I'm really excited to think we could have a whole new upcycled kitchen made from beautiful reclaimed wood, without spending a penny...
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