DIY Pallet Wood Wall for a Bathroom

Here at Remodelaholic, we love projects that require little or no money to complete.  Better yet, if they use repurposed or reclaimed materials, we are all over that!  So, of course we can’t help but be excited by all the pallet wood projects we’ve been seeing lately.  Today’s guest blogger has one to show us:  a pallet wood wall in the bathroom.

We love the look of rustic wood, and we’re continually amazed by all of the different looks that we’ve seen coming from humble shipping pallets.  Here are a few of our favorites:

Media Center from Pallet Wood | Design, Dining + Diapers

Pallet Ceiling | Maple Leaves and Sycamore Trees featured at Remodelaholic

Pallet Headboard | Home by Heidi

Nursery Pallet Wall | Owen’s Olivia featured at Remodelaholic

Pallet Benches | Our Vintage Home Love

What we love about our guest blogger’s pallet wall is that she spent nothing on this project.  Everything she used was stuff that she already had on hand.  Impressive!  We also like the architectural interest this wall provides in a room that would be pretty ho-hum, otherwise.  Let’s take a look at how she did it.

Pallet Wood Wall
Submitted by Mandy Jean Chic

Hi!  I’m Mandy Jean.  I’m a law enforcement wife, mom to five “fur kids”, fashion loving, makeup wearing, 4×4 enthusiast, gun shooting, DIY project kinda girl.   We purchased our home in September of 2008. Yup.. that’s right… just before the real estate crash in Oct of 2008.  Regardless, we love our house!  We had our home built by DR. Horton.  It’s not the biggest house on the block but she is the fanciest, thanks to all of the hard work we’ve put into making her our own. 

During the 4 day weekend before Christmas hubby and I decided to tackle our 1/2 bath/water closet.  To add to the fun we decided to use only items and supplies we had laying around the house.  As renovators and DIYers know you always have extra paint and supplies.  After some thought we decided to use some pallets we collected from a 4×4 trip and create a focal wall.  

For this DIY you can use fence slats, barn wood, or old pallets.

The hardest part of this project by far was taking the pallets apart without breaking them. Be sure to use your safety equipment, and try to save a few of the old nails to reuse to help the wall look authentic. Gloves and eye protection are a must for this project! 

You will need to find out the square footage of the wall you are going to cover. To do that you take the height and width of the wall in feet rounding up to the next foot and multiply them together. Then we laid out the boards and took measurements to ensure we had enough to cover the needed square footage for this project. Laying them out also gives you a chance to get an idea of how it will fit together.  

We painted the water closet before starting the wood project. You may need to do touch ups after your wood is on the wall because you will have some scratches here and there.  Also it is important to paint the wall behind the wood because in this application there will be cracks and gaps that add to the rustic look. We could have used different colors depending on what look we wanted to pull from the wood. A blue gray or silver would have enhanced the blues and grays common in sun bleached weather exposed wood. Browns can make the wood look more used but not as old. We used black to get the look of a space or emptiness behind the wall. No matter the color you go with it is important to use a flat to limit any shine, it should look like an old wood wall not a new shiny wall covered by old wood.   

Using a good adhesive (liquid nails) and a few of the old nails we started at the top and worked our way down. We liked the look of having the boards staggered in no real order. So with a jigsaw we cut some at different lengths. Being sure to pair up matching widths. Very few walls are perfectly square so length measurements were taken for each row as we went this is important because wall measurements can very from ceiling and floor level. You will find it is very possible that each row could be a different enough length to affect the final cut. It is also important to be thinking a few steps ahead and have your next few boards planned because some of the boards may not always be the same size (width and thickness). Thickness is not very critical in this application because changes in thickness will add more texture to the wall, however width is a little more important. If the next board you place is a lot wider or thinner than the one you are pairing it to the next row will have a very uneven gap. Some gaps look good but to large of a gap and it can look poorly thought out. If you are going to go with a staggered look keep in mind that a few full length or longer boards will add to the total stability of the project.

Once we reached about half way we changed direction and worked from the bottom up. The reason this was done was because we knew it would be a possibility that we would be cutting a board down the middle to fit the last gap, and by placing this thinner board behind a fixed object like the toilet it helps to blend it in with the surrounding boards. In the picture above both boards on top of the visible black wall and below it are cut 2 inches thinner than the others but because they are separated and distracted by the toilet it is not as noticeable as one board would be cut 4 inches thinner. The last boards were secured in place completing the wall. This took about six hours including painting and the dismantling of the pallets. 

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