Building a Bridge with Recycled Pallets

Little by little we're making our Home in the Woods!

The very first structure we built at No Man's Land Extravaganza was a little bridge to span over a ditch. It links together a pretty little camping area under the pine trees, and The Launche Pad, a place where sunlight, food, art and living are its main functions.

As you can see the railings aren't finished, but you get the idea of what I'm trying to accomplish here right?

We want to build with natural materials as much as possible and up-cycle the rest.

We collected a few pallets and a bunch of crates made of the same type of wood , they are mostly for shipping statues.... We have an "antique" dealer down the hill from us whose front yard is full of concrete Buddhas, Chinese Warriors, Turttles and Fountains (there are even dolphins and lions from time to time).

We talked to our antiquitaire neighbor, as you should in every situation where you need to go through someone dumpster to collect what is valuable to you. We got the green light to harvest all that we wanted from a specific area! The source is close to home and free... Why isn't everyone doing this again, can someone remind me please?

So, as pretty and glamorous reclaimed pallet wood for furniture and construction has become, don't be fooled it is a lot of work! What takes the longest time is cleaning the wood, getting rid of all the rusted nails that traveled the 7 seas to get here and separate each piece into some kind of organized chaos...

Once done, the fun begins and every piece, bent or not gets used for something. Even when the left overs go into the fire, they are being used for something!

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We try to use only the crates or pallets that have been marked with a HT. It stands for Heat Treated and that makes me feel a lot better than Chemically... I don't claim to know if it realy is HT, a stamp is just a stamp in the end you know! There are numbers on the marking that can be used to track down the manifacturer if you wish to dig past the label.

Source: The good, the bad, and the ugly, click on it if you want to find out what the different markings mean

Enough technical talk... Let's look at this bridge now:

We picked out three strong tree trunks from the forest ground, laid them across our ditch. Something we will need to do before long is add a stone under each point where our tree trunks touch the dirt. The less contact with moisture hanging around it, the longer it will last.

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In the center of it we placed a full (4x4 feet) pallet, then nailed our strips of wood that we previously cleaned, side to side. I used galvanized nails, it was satisfying to use a hammer for once... I'm so used to mostly working with battery powered tools!
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The pieces are staggered on the edges like that because the perfectionist in me wanted certain parts of the boards to be in the center of the bridge. It ended up looking so fun, we decided leave them alone instead of cutting the sides all straight, like the original plan!

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Here's a side view. It's a small ditch, but now we use that bridge all the time to get back and forth.

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My brother in law, always hard at work, thanks for all your help buddy... A little custom job for this little bump in the road! You can see it from both ends of the bridge, it looks loads better in real life though.

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More material coming from the forest ground will make up the railings for this bridge.

And voilà... This was literally the first structure ever built at our Homestead Extravaganza.

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Although it is unfinished, I was really proud of the work my brother and I did with it. The railings will definitely wrap it up nice, it'll really give that sort of Fairy Land, Doctor Seuss, Tim Burton look that I love and want for a lot of our structures here.

There is plenty to build and we will be there full time starting June 2018, so expect a lot more of these types of posts soon!!!

If you really want to know what is inside this Coconut, take a look at Humans Of Steemit.

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