Help me find Shipping Pallet furniture plans mentioned in the latest Dwell.

March 18, 2008 2:11 PM

In the latest Dwell magazine there was a house featured with a chair made from pallets. Very simple and elegant, it also had a small mention of a company called Tolstrup. Help me find the downloadable plans mentioned.

After about a half hour of googling I cant seem to find a site for Tolstrup or a location for the plans. I'm very interested in furnishing my new apartment with interesting pieces I can easily make myself. So my primary objective is to find this site, but if anyone else has some suggestions of crafty furniture ideas please feel free to share. Thanks in advance!

posted by huxley to home & garden (9 answers total)

Here you go.
posted by Floydd at 2:16 PM on March 18, 2008 [4 favorites]

Oh Yikes, 10 pounds. That kinda defeats my furnish for free concept. I guess this calls for a little experimentation. Thanks much Floydd.
posted by huxley at 2:21 PM on March 18, 2008

This should get you something close.

Get a wood pallet
Cut it apart after the fourth slat with a handsaw.
Knock out the fourth slat with a hammer.
Cut that slat in half to use for the feet.
Knock out the sixth slat.
Attach what is now the first three slats and with legs where the sixth slat was.
Use long carriage bolts with appropriate nuts and washers. I would borrow a drill to do this part.
Attach legs from above with more carriage bolt, nuts, washers and drill.
See if its at a comfy angle, if not adjust bolts.
Sand well to avoid splinters in your butt.
Finish as desired.
posted by stormygrey at 3:07 PM on March 18, 2008 [1 favorite]

I wouldn't want a pallet in my house unless it was brand new. As they make their rounds, the chances are very good that they've had drums of chemicals as their payload, and those drums are known to leak.
posted by bricoleur at 4:01 PM on March 18, 2008

Everything comes on pallets, leaky drums are the least of my concern. Splinter in the butt is definitely more likely.. but the finished product will be sanded and treated so I'm not really worried either way. Thanks for the info guys. Gonna give this a shot next week.
posted by huxley at 4:48 PM on March 18, 2008

bricoleur writes "I wouldn't want a pallet in my house unless it was brand new. As they make their rounds, the chances are very good that they've had drums of chemicals as their payload, and those drums are known to leak."

Get pallets from restaurants. Food safe shipping and hazardous good shipping are generally kept apart from each other.
posted by Mitheral at 5:31 PM on March 18, 2008

As someone who handles pallets every day, I want to tell you about pallets.

There are narrow ones. There are wide ones. There are light-duty ones and heavy duty ones. A pallet of, say, pillows might weigh in at 500 lbs. A pallet of block is closer to 5000-7000.

There are ones made with thicker, nicer wood. There are ones made with extremely thin, splintery crap. There are painted ones. There are plastic ones.

They all burn. Fast and hot. And mean.

Forget getting them from restaurants, go to a supply yard and ask to raid their stack. They'll probably have a huge big bunch of them. Take your pick. Find the sturdy ones, but you probably want to avoid the block holding ones. They weigh...oh...probably 50-70lbs. Come see me, I've got a stack of them behind my store I'll let you take your pick of. :)
posted by TomMelee at 5:44 PM on March 18, 2008 [2 favorites]

I've gotten pallets from behind Home Depot--there are usually huge stacks there. But I've also gone directly to a pallet supplier. He was happy to give me the three or four that I needed. They were all a bit irregular for his purposes; since he shipped pallets qua pallets, he liked for them all to be uniform, so anything a bit wider, or narrower, or lighter or heavier was a pain for him. He gave me a nice lecture about the pallet-production industry, and even had one of his guys load the pallets into my truck.
posted by MrMoonPie at 6:03 AM on March 19, 2008

There's an episode of New Yankee Workshop where Norm built a coffee table out of pallets, and it seemed like a real pain-in-the-ass. Lots of work required to make the wood usable. One tricky part is that if you don't get all the staples/nails out, it will destroy your sanding belts when you hit one. Another issue is that pallets are used until they are very distressed, because it's a lot easier to just put a dozen staples into it to hold it together than to buy a new one.
posted by smackfu at 7:37 AM on March 26, 2008