Wood pallet bed

In all our married life, we’ve never had a bed.  Okay, so we’ve always had a bed, just not a headboard or foot board.  There’s just always been so many other places for money to go, and the bedroom always came last. For many years we couldn’t even make one, because we were living in apartments/townhomes while we were in school and then while were building our house, and didn’t have room for tools.  When we finally moved into our house, and had all the tools we needed, there were always a million other projects, and the bed kept going lower on the list.  When I found some wood pallets a couple months ago, I knew it was finally time! I love out wood pallet bed, and you can make one too!

{BEFORE}

 

{I actually forgot to take a before picture, so this is one that was taken awhile ago…)

{AFTER}

You guys, this is an easy bed to make!  There aren’t too many steps, and you could substitute the pallets for shutters, cabinets, or wood planks. We are actually in the process of making beds for our girls out of shutters, but using this same technique. I didn’t do an in-depth tutorial for a couple of reasons.  First of all, there are a million bed tutorials out there, and I didn’t think the need was there for another one.  Secondly, my hubby made this one mostly himself as a gift to me, and he isn’t used to taking pictures of every single step like I am. :)  So, this is a very basic outline of the steps we took, to give you an idea of what we did.  If you have any further questions, or need clarification on anything, please post a comment or e-mail me.

{TUTORIAL}

You can see in the picture above that the pieces of wood we used on the front and back are different sizes.  The 1×4 needs to go on the front, but because the back isn’t going to show, it doesn’t matter as much.  We just used a scrap piece of wood that was a little smaller–about 3 inches.

Steps 3 & 4 are for the BACKS of the headboard and footboard only!

We didn’t get a picture of the last step, so I took a couple after it was done.

After all the pieces were made, we sanded them completely smooth, painted them black, then added a coat of poly. We attached the headboard and footboard together with 2×8’s, and placed wooden slats across the middle for the mattresses to sit on.

Measurements for the bed:

Top of headboard to floor:  56 inches
Top of footboard to floor:  20.5 inches
Length of headboard/footboard:  83.5 inches

I LOVE LOVE LOVE how it turned out!