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Recycled pallet timber used to build two pot plant stands, with one fitted with castors.
The project
My partner and I always end up with lots of little plants in little pots. We aren't plant hoarders, but we do like to collect interesting things. We're always propagating plants, and one of us has a habit of buying things to plant in the garden when she doesn't have time to plant them.
The solution? This simple pallet-wood plant stand, which I based on MitchellMc's handy guide How to build a tiered plant stand (which he based on JI's Garden planter stand).
All the crosspieces are pallet timber, and the vertical ones are treated Pine sleepers. I used the Pine Sienna MicroPro sleepers because their brown colour seemed a better starting point for staining than regular green treated Pine.
I modified Mitchell's design a bit, to use less wood and also to keep the whole structure open so it would dry more quickly after rain or hose watering. I screwed it together with my trusty little Ryobi ONE+ 18V drill driver and gave it a few coats of Intergrain UltraDeck timber decking oil. We're really happy with it. So, thanks to Mitchell and to JI.
Some of the pallets were made in heat-treated wood which was quite hard and brittle. I frequently damaged it when using a nail punch to punch out bits of nails whose heads had pulled into the timber when I was prising the pallets apart. Those nails came out, but so did big, chunky splinters of the timber. Good thing I was going for a rustic look.
The plant stand was my second pallet project. The first was this "skateboard" for plants. We used to have an old sleeper propped up on a couple of bricks to keep a lot of little plants off the ground. It looked pretty crummy. This looks better, and I put castors on it so it's easy to move to sweep behind it, or to put under cover during protracted rain.
Both projects were fun and satisfying and quite easy once I'd managed to pull the pallets apart. I'd never made anything like this before, but after seeing so many great pallet projects here on Workshop, I decided to have a crack. I'm glad I did.
More inspiration for your plant stand project
Workshop member Imenz shared plans for a pallet timber plant stand.
Mitchell created a recycled pallet ladder pot stand, which he finished off with Dulux Design chalk effect paint.
You can get more inspiration from our community's Top 10 most popular pallet projects.
