Succulent Pallet Table

Succulent Pallet Table

Whew! The last week was a whirl­wind!  I actu­ally LOVE the Home & Gar­den Show.  I’m an extro­vert so talk­ing to hun­dreds of peo­ple about plants etc. is a lot of fun for me!  This is the first year in the last five that I am not design­ing pri­vately and thus was not trolling for clients at the show– I just got to enjoy it with no stress attached!  I found that there just was not enough time to be a Wife & Mom, work at the Gar­den and run the con­sult­ing biz– some­thing had to go and I’m rather attached to the fam­ily and a steady pay­check!  How­ever, I just couldn’t resist the urge to design at least SOMETHING for the show!

I have long enjoyed re-purposing items for my gar­den and so I thought I’d try a lit­tle of that for the Home Show.  As recy­cled pal­lets are one of the hottest trends on Pin­ter­est AND Utah is gen­er­ally slow to catch on to new trends, I could totally jump on the band­wagon while still appear­ing cut­ting edge (said with just a tinge of guilt!)  Mat­tie of Flora Grubb Gar­dens cre­ated a fab­u­lous suc­cu­lent table for last year’s Sun­set Mag­a­zine Cel­e­bra­tion Week­end.  I’ll just link to the orig­i­nal so as to give credit where due but I won’t post any pho­tos here as I do not have per­mis­sion to do so.

In any case, I used that project for the inspi­ra­tion but made my table a bit dif­fer­ent.  I didn’t want to be lim­ited by the size of the pal­lets as I needed this table to fit my fam­ily AFTER the show (it is now grac­ing our back patio)!  The orig­i­nal table had a fab­u­lous remov­able cen­ter planter (to enable them to deliver it on the top of a Sub­aru!) I opted for a sim­pler built-in ver­sion as we’ve got a nice, big Ford 150 to be the work­horse.  Also, I laid the top boards per­pen­dic­u­lar to the plant­ing trough which allowed me to make the table any length I wished– so long as I had enough pal­let pieces.

The most impor­tant step is to find some decent pal­lets!  I was asked by many peo­ple at the show where to find pal­lets in the first place.  I have a cou­ple that I got for free from a build­ing mate­ri­als sup­ply com­pany.  How­ever, the slats on them were a lit­tle thin so I decided to look around a bit more.  My friend has some pal­lets that were used to deliver cin­der blocks for a wall around their new home– those pal­lets are OAK!  In gen­eral, the heav­ier the load they sup­port, the bet­ter the wood used to cre­ate them.  Ulti­mately I got mine from a local pal­let com­pany that sells new and recy­cled pal­lets.  At the show, I was told by a bunch of peo­ple they had seen free pal­lets offered up on the KSL Clas­si­fieds– so check there for easy pickins.

I actu­ally cheated a bit and got my pal­let mate­r­ial from the recy­cled pal­let area at a local pal­let sup­ply com­pany.  When I went into the office to ask, I thought the man­ager would think I was crazy.  And he DID laugh!  Hard.  But only because he said his wife had pinned the photo of the ‘inspi­ra­tion’ table to Pin­ter­est the night before.  He said that he told her if he, as a man­ager of a pal­let com­pany, had made it– she would think it was ‘white trash’.  How­ever, because some­one COOL had made it, it was genius!  I’ve never met his wife but, wher­ever you are, thanks!  The man­ager was fab­u­lous about help­ing me find some great pal­let slats from their recy­cle pile and those old boards included some oak and aspen hard­woods in addi­tion to the stan­dard fir and pine.  I like the slight vari­ances in color and grain that comes from using dif­fer­ent woods.

A mix of Lewisia (in bloom), Sedum ‘Lemon Ball’, Sedum ‘Old Man Bones’, Sedum his­pan­icum ‘Pur­ple Form’, Sedum nevii ‘Sil­ver Frost’ and the bur­gundy rosettes are Sem­per­vivum ‘Red Ace’

I cre­ated the table to attract atten­tion to our booth but also to help pique inter­est in a new pro­gram I am launch­ing through my job, a local real-world “Home & Gar­den Club” which I clearly need to blog more about! I’m so excited about the Club.  One of the rea­sons I started as a vol­un­teer at the Gar­den in 2007 was to cre­ate some type of Gar­den Club so the real­iza­tion of this goal has been a long time coming.

I cre­ated a 2-part tuto­r­ial for how to build this pal­let table and posted it over at the new blog for the Home & Gar­den Club.

You can find it HERE.

Related posts:

DIY Land­scape Cen­ter FREEBIES
David Salman and Invit­ing Pol­li­na­tors into the Garden
Gar­den ‘Whimsy’ Done Right!

Comments

  1. Matti says:

    Whoa, your table looks awe­some! I love what you have done by adding some big wheels on it. I just made a lit­tle cof­fee table and added some wheels to make it roll. BTW, feel free to share any of the Far Out Flora pics (for non com­mer­cial use). Most of them are on our Flickr. Keep on build­ing.
    Matti

  2. Cynthia says:

    Awe­some! Thanks for the per­mis­sion to put up a photo of your table! I am obvi­ously rebuild­ing the blog today (sorry you caught me in a bit of a mess). I am hop­ing to visit your lovely shop this fall and I’ll make sure to say hello! Flora Grub Gar­dens has been a huge source of inspi­ra­tion for me!

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