There are plenty of people telling how they built their tiny house ridiculously cheaply, but they got all or almost all of their materials for free. They really like using pallets for siding. There is one for free in my area. How far will that get me?
I searched for free pallets in my ZIP and just found some webpages telling me contradictory things like "It is pointless to check supermarkets for free pallets, they always have pallet recycling programs" and "Check your local supermarkets!"
Another page said that pallets used to transport food often have food spills, which invite mold.
If one wanted pallets, they might as well try to find some for free, but as popular as pallet crafts appear on Pinterest, plus people up here burning them for heat, I wonder how many I would find.
Okay. Let's say that you find so many pallets that you can use them for the exterior and interior walls, floor, ceiling, and roof, where do you get 2x4s cheaply?
I did not find anything, but I did not spend hours looking, like I did for pallets.
Someone on reddit said to find companies that do stone cabinets, they go through tons of crates made with good wood. Someone else said that dismantling crates is too labor-intensive.
One of those other pages said that it is often worth paying for them instead of scavenging. Someone mentioned all the time and energy involved in dismantling them.
Here is a twelve-minute video of a guy dismantling a pallet using a four-pound sledge hammer, a claw hammer, and scrap wood. Seriously, that is it! I watched other videos and they seemed to take much more time and used special tools.
I was trying to wrap up this mess and do something productive--or fun--and was closing down the rest of the tabs that I had opened when I saw Izzy Swan's video:
He made a tool out of wood and dismantled a pallet in 2.5 minutes, but how long does it take to remove the nails?
If it takes ninety seconds to remove the nails then this is three times as fast as the other video.
That changes things, but as much as I love saving old things, there is definitely an argument for purchasing new materials and saving a ridiculous amount of time.
So, five pallets in one hour and lots of exercise. This guy waited for his wife to take a nap to start hammering pallets apart. He mentioned wearing a mask "since pallet sawdust isn’t thought to be part of a healthy diet." I think that it took him an hour and a half to dismantle one pallet and then he gave up, bought new wood, and "Distressed it."
https://www.younghouselove.com/how-m...odchuck-chuck/
I never understand that, like buying jeans that look like they should have been thrown away.
This post says "It takes about 7 or 8 pallet boards to get 10 square feet."
Seriously?! Let's say that you have a 10' cube with doors and shutters made from pallet wood. If we say 9'8" it would (more or less) average out to 10'.
That is 560.67 square feet for the interior and 533.89 square feet for the roof and exterior walls. That totals 1,094.56 square feet. At 7.5 pallets per 10 square feet, it would require 821 pallets!
If you dismantle five pallets an hour it would take 164 hours or four forty-hour weeks and four hours. [Or fifty-five hours with Izzy Swan's method]
I suddenly cannot find tiny houses built with pallet wood siding--just tiny houses built out of whole pallets, like
this, made from "just" 80 pallets (100. Why does everyone lie?!):
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A 250 square foot 'Pallet House' requires 100 recycled pallets nailed and lifted into place by 4-5 people using hand tools in under a week.
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No windows, doors, or insulation.
Five people working full-time for a week for this?
"To find free pallets, a quick internet search should bring up anything you need."
I have been looking for two and a half hours!
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[B]uilding with repurposed materials drastically increased the amount of time it took to build the tiny house. If I were to have built with all new materials I could have carefully planned out my list and done just one or two trips to the store with a truck. Instead I spent many days searching the internet. This was very time consuming. I had [a volunteer] help me find materials. She spent about 25 hours on this.
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[T]he average power drill gets used for only half an hour in its lifetime.
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I have used both my drill and my electric screwdriver more than that and I am confident that Dad's drill has seen a great deal of use.
I screwed together a fence for the back yard. It took forever!
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In total about 40 volunteers helped out and the total hours that have gone into the house so far is 225.
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Seriously?!
I found a dozen pallet companies in Phoenix and none of them post current prices. Do they fluctuate that badly?
Alibaba shows bulk pallets for about $5 each, although I do not have any idea how much shipping would be. Eighty, like you supposedly need for that weird shack, would cost $400, but it actually says 100, so $500.
If you made the 10' cube requiring 821 pallets it would cost $4,105 for 100 square feet.
This post says: "Pallet Prices for B Grade Recycled Wood Pallets - $5.00 - $7.00."
Instead of getting volunteers to repurpose used materials, would it make more sense to get volunteers for a fund raiser to buy new materials, if either way the materials are used for charity?
How bad is it that pallets go to the dump, at least if they are heat-treated?
[What are you supposed to do with chemically-treated pallets anyway?]
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