Building a Floor with Pallet Wood -Tiny Pallet House in the woods

all right today we're going to make this right now right now we're going to build it in just a second before my papa makes it so what I'm going to show you I'm just going to show you it cuz my big boy is about to come and do it so what we're going to use nails and some what are they what are the things what you get to stick on to the palettes for the floor screws screws screws we use to screw on to it if you're new to the project then a big warm welcome if you're a T route and welcome back here on steep in the woods we are building a house out of pallets on our off-grid Mountain we are not doing this because it's trendy we are not doing this because it's cool we are doing this because it is necessary so I would keep that in mind throughout this entire build process we do not have the means to build the entire house at once so we're starting with a single room this is that room in and of itself solo it will appear to be a pallet Tower however when the rest of the house is finished it won't look like that as much now we are doing this out of necessity so this is not going to be perfect uh but I am happy with how it turned out if this was not a a tower room I would have built the floor slightly differently but we needed to put a little bit more effort and a little bit more supplies in it so that it would hold up to the weight that's going to be on top of it so buckle up boys here's a time lapse of building this floor I'm Josh and and this is our daughter Ivy I'm selia and this is our son heish here on steep in the woods we live completely off grid on a 26 acre Homestead nestled deep in the appalachin mountains you'll see no fancy stuff here it's just makeing do with what you have and what you can figure out so the first thing that I will tell you is that building with pallets is extraordinarily difficult um at least if you have any amount of what's the word any amount of of of pride in your work or any kind of Standards to your building this is incredibly difficult to build with uh I've always wanted to build a house out of pallets so it is definitely uh it was sort of a bucket list item and the entire point of us um owning 26 Acres uh uh you know having a piece of of prop property that's large and it is where we live now there are no building codes that is uh crucial to note absolutely crucial and and the reason why we had to go somewhere like that was because of the pilot house because of not having the availability or the or the options to to let's just say buy plywood plywood alone let's say you got all of your 2x4s and 2x sixes all of your your your solid building materials for free um the plywood alone pushes us out of of house ownership and uh that just really is the way the world's the world's turning towards working um used to be it was it was hard enough to buy a house but now uh it's it's next to impossible to even build one yourself so we moved somewhere with no code so we could do something similar to this um I will tell you it is extraordinarily difficult to keep a a high standard of construction when building with pallets so the first off um there is about there's a little over a half inch difference between the smallest of these 12 pallets and the largest um that would lead to some extraordinarily large gaps so what I did was I measured each and every pallette and I knew that this floor is four pallets wide and three pallets long so I measured all 12 pallets and then grouped them in groups of three based on the closest measurement so instead of just throwing it together willy-nilly um and having half inch plus gaps you know in in in random sporadic places we were able to condense that through math and through sorting to less than a quarter inch um and that was crucial for me I wanted it to I wanted it to fit together I wanted you know you want it to look like you know what you're doing um even though I'm not saying that I do um you know it was important to me to have some amount of building standards um however pallets are extraordinarily sturdy I'm I have I've worked as a forklift driver for many many years and I will tell you pallets are some of the toughest darn things in the world um and they and they actually turn out to be tougher than a stick built house um there are means and methods for that which I don't know if we have enough time to delve into on this video um on this particular you know uh a floor build video but it is a I believe it's it is a a good sturdy uh building material to use however it it will take more time and it is is more fiddly but either way so what we did was these palletes here we decided to use these 12 pallettes not only because the measurements of 12 of them grouped together in a square were really really similar uh this turned out to be like0 in by 120 no 125 in by 127 and I didn't have to cut any of the pallets so um we chose these not only for that reason but also because they are beefier the you know these pallet still have three runners in them 1 2 3 they're also made out of 2x4s right and these are not four-way palletes uh the pallets you see with little cutouts on the sides of them those are four-way pallets that's so you can pick them up with a forklift from either the front or the side also them being smaller means that we have less than a foot gap between each of the floor boards whereas with a normal size pallet you would have around 19 uh 19 in gap so we chose these for that reason we also went out and we bought six 2x4s which we were going which we slid into the actual uh the actual pallets themselves um that was to that was to laminate them and add strength to it and really six boards wasn't a lot of money but it it added an awful lot of strength and an awful lot of peace of mind we also went with 2x sixes around the edges um because you know the pallet these pallets are made out of 2x4s and they have a/ in board on the top and a/ in board on the bottom so doing a 2x4 around the rim would have would it it wouldn't have looked as good and it wouldn't have have spanned the distance between floor trusses the large beams it wouldn't have spanned that distance quite as well but the 2 by uh the 2x4s that we purchased only go in the places where there are no other laminations because the key point the key point with this build and how we're building the house differently than than every other pallet house that you're going to going to see um you know I spent quite a bit of time looking at them and and to my knowledge no one else has done it like this which is really surprising to me because this is the only way uh uh the only building method that makes sense and that actually gives you a a relatively sturdy uh foundation for your house is that we staggered them so they're three pallets long 1 2 3 this first row right here I cut two of them in half so it goes half pallet two holes and another half now this next row here is three solid pallets so none of these seams are lining up if you would look most people will put pallets and line them up perfectly and just stick a 2x4 in the middle however that means that the only thing holding this deal together is just a couple 2x4s you're not actually using the strength of the pallet itself so by offsetting these pallets you get a you you get the entire strength of of the pallet and as I have mentioned uh pallets are actually remarkably strong and remarkably remarkably sturdy so you want to utilize that strength in your building and really it doesn't take a whole lot just I think with this so we got a a 12 pallet floor here only had to cut two pallets in half that was it and then stagger those throughout the uh build that's all that it took to to to Really gain this this huge amount of strength in it as you'll see in the time-lapse videos I'm predominantly using screws um that is that is for several reasons one I I I like screws um I'm not a professional builder and uh and and more often than not I mean I don't have a legitimate number but if I could if I could convey to you the amount of times I've built something and done it slightly wrong or not been happy with it and then and then at least whether or not it was necessary uh how many times I've wanted to take that apart and do it differently uh which would have been a nightmare with nails so I like screws because you have the ability to build a thing the entire thing thing in theory if you only use screws you can build an entire house out of screws and and if for some reason you needed to or you wanted to you could literally disassemble that house into all of its pieces whereas if you use Nails that's very very difficult um so we are using a lot of screws in this floor however um off of camera in the future uh actually probably this evening as per time of filming this uh I will be adding Nails as well because I know now you know I've built the thing I've looked at it I know that I'm happy with it um so I got all of the uh all of the fallback um a ability to take this apart by using screws but we're also going to be adding nails now that we know that we're happy with it um so yes I'm using predominantly screws but there are going to be Nails involved as well and uh and I would encourage you to do that they do have their different places screws aren't necessarily perfect for everything so instead of instead of taking the risk of building this and doing it wrong somehow however that may be of building it and then coming out and looking at it and thinking oh God I don't like that you know I have no ability to take it apart where I to use Nails um so definitely that's that's one of the reasons why I like screws um and we will be putting nails in this so we will be using double Fasteners it will be stronger than it would have been before and uh really you know we're building a house with pallets here screws are not free nails are not free but but you know there's going to be some amount of cost in it so I'm not necessarily trying to make this the absolute cheapest thing ever we're just trying to make it the cheapest um and still have some level of of construction pride in it now the other reason why I really like screws and why I use them all the time is because of the compression action these boards are not perfect and if you go to lows you're not going to get perfect boards either pretty much perfect boards just don't exist um yes I am one of those guys who will go to go to Lowe's for three boards and dig through 30 of them trying to find three really good ones uh but even then there there it's just the best of the worst um so with screws you have the ability to to to to form things and and and you get that compression action especially using something like pallet boards um they're not all perfectly straight but with a screw you can you you can mold them some you know you can Flex them and and get a straighter line um or or a closer seam using screws we're going to take a pause in this video to give a big shout out to the sponsor of this video it is a tough old rout member whose name I'm not sure I can pronounce correctly and I feel like it'd be worse to get it wrong than to just not say it at all but you know who you are and we have few enough numbers where everyone else could probably guess uh she sent us the screws off of our Amazon wish list we did not ask her this was completely out of the blue uh we do occas have people get things off of that list but she got them at by God the perfect dang moment when I absolutely needed them and they were crucial right then uh uh she had no idea how important that was to me at that exact moment so thank you thank you very very much so we used those screws to attach our pallets to our three large beams um I put four screws per Junction which is two screws per actual board that contacts this beam uh I pre-drilled holes and then I also got a larger drill drill bit to to to to counter sync these screws just to give us as much bite um as possible uh so I I went down about an inch one of our next steps is to attach the cables from our anchors to the actual beams and I want as solid of a connection there as possible um I want these beams to be permanently mated to the house itself that way the anchors can do their their job um and that way the house is as sturdy as possible I may also get some brackets later and add those in but really the screws right now they they're more than enough the brackets would just be Overkill um however for the cost I may Overkill it so that is why we did those um yes you can toenail screws you can toenail Nails you can do any of that um I never really liked doing that if possible I avoid it and thanks to that tough old Route remember um I was able to avoid it and go straight through the board itself giving us a much more sturdy uh connection and a lot less um make it a lot less likely uh to to get cracks in our boards themselves also with the uh the 2x sixes that go around the edges I wanted those to connect solidly to our beams as well giving us three board links on the front and the back of this structure um that was that was pretty difficult uh it I felt like I was picking a lock um I you know there'll be a there'll be a picture here um of where I had I literally filed them down because I wanted them to to contact the beam perfectly um it did take a little a little bit of time it may or may not have been worth it in the grand scheme of things but that's just the that's just a snippet of the kind of thing you're going to run into with using pallet wood uh I did everything I could to make our three large beams as solid and as seamless and as flat and as perfect as possible using screws using clamps um um every every tool available to us but they still were not perfect so either way that's that's why that board looks like that and that's why we did it um if this 2x6 was just a facing board then it wouldn't carry any weight so by cutting out where the beams the beams are placed uh we got an extra uh we got extra strength out of our structure [Music] so there you go that's how we built the floor of our our pallet Tower um the way that we did it you you can completely do it a different way it's 100% possible to laminate your own Boards out of pallet wood um and not go out and buy you know store-bought Lumber to to intermix with with with with with your pallet building um but that gave me a lot of peace of mind and and if you're going to build a two-story house a pilot Tower I would encourage you to do this because your floor is absolutely crucial um if you're building a chicken Co a workshop a single level house it's probably not necessary but I felt like it was necessary for us here now this build is going to be very interesting even if you don't like it even if it's not perfect even if it don't work it'll be interesting so I encourage you guys to come along for the full process to join the journey with us here on steep in the woods and as always remember if you like what you saw hit that button if you're new to the project hit that other button you know support the project there are links below until next time here step in the woods

Channel: Steep in the Woods

Views: 44,940

Keywords: steep in the woods, off the grid, tiny house, pallet house, pallet build, pallet projects, floor, how to, diy, build a floor, made out of pallets, cabin, in the woods, off grid mountain, 2 story, pallet tower, budget, cheap, trendy, cool, upcycled, recycled, save money, small floor, sturdy, strong, pallet wood, building, free pallets, salvaged, tiny home, barn floor, shed, workshop, low cost, affordable, step by step, time lapse, start to finish, used

Id: zJuuI0Mycq8

Length: 18min 22sec (1102 seconds)

Published: Sat Nov 25 2023