Here’s one of the small non-prop projects I did last summer that I haven’t gotten around to talking about. I made a small fence using leftovers of a wood pallet.

We have a doggo. She’s the best doggo in the world, as all doggos are. She also doesn’t always listen, as doggos tend to do. There’s one corner of our backyard where that we’d been cleaning up and getting ready for something new to be planted there, but our doggo kept jumping into the sand there even though she’s not supposed to. Fences are expensive, but I had some leftovers of an old wood pallet lying around that I figured I could reuse.

Cast your mind back to when I built my outdoor spray area (which, by the way, without a roof over it, has gotten quite gross and green and spidery over the past year, and is in desperate need of an upgrade… but that’s neither here not there). I had to saw a bunch of old pallets so their sizes would match, and I still had a bunch of leftover bits from that project.

It didn’t even take a lot of work. I started by cutting it to size and using a sander with very low grit sandpaper on it to add some nice fence-y points. That alone already made it look like a fence without any extra effort

Although as you can see, it was pretty dirty (especially the right side there), and the rough sandpaper I used in to create the points resulted in quite a few splinters, which is less than ideal. So I used a finer-grit sandpaper on the sander to do some cleaning on the surface, then manually went in with some 240-grid sandpaper to clean up these splinters:

Then I applied a basic clear coat to give it some protection from the elements, screwed in two other leftover pieces of wood each about 30cm long so it could be hammered into the ground, and my fence was done:

It’s great to be able to recycle materials that would’ve otherwise just been wasted. And honestly, I think it looks much better than many of the cheap plastic fences we checked out – and it’s much, much sturdier as well. And wood just has that certain je ne sais quoi that adds that extra bit of class… even to a trash fence. 🙂

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