DIY Pallet Bench

Although we have a lot more square footage in our new house than we did in our apartment, all of the spaces are pretty small. Because of this, multifunctional furniture really comes in handy! Although I’m sure I’m not the first to do this, it is one of the rare ideas I’ve had that I didn’t first see on Pinterest! Yay for creativity! 😉 Anyway, I knew I wanted a seating solution that could easily be moved around the room when guests were over and pushed out of the way when they weren’t. Honestly the storage idea came after I already made it, but it’s a nice feature too! I love that it brings in the fun fabric as well, which includes the colors I’d like use as my color scheme in this room.

Now for the tutorial!

Materials needed:

Wood Pallet

Cushion foam

4 Locking casters

Luaun board (thin plywood) cut to the size of your pallet half

1.5-2 yds of fabric

screws

wood glue

staple gun

First, find a pallet. You can usually find them for free! Check your local Habitat for Humanity Restore, that is where we got ours. They had a huge pile they were trying to get rid of.

Next, cut it in half. You may have to reposition some of the boards like we did.

Now sand it down. I went crazy with the electric sander on this step 🙂 Wanted to make sure there were no chances for splinters!

(Yellow spray paint from another project yet-to-be-shared!)

The next step is to screw the two halves together and attach the casters. I had my handy hubby handle this step 🙂 Just screw diagonally into the vertical support boards.

You’re done with the base! Easy Peasy! On to the cushion top. For the foam, I scored a deal at Home Depot by buying what they call a “camping pad.” They are only seasonal (summer) so I picked mine up before we even moved to this house. You can also do this with foam from Joann’s or someplace like that, but it can be kind of expensive. The foam I used was about 4 inches thick and not as dense as the craft store foam.

Arrange your fabric so the pattern is centered on the foam. Cut your foam to size and lay it on top of the fabric and top the foam with your luaun. (You can also wrap the foam in batting before the fabric, but I didn’t have any.) Get your staple gun handy! Put one staple in each side of the plywood (doing one side, then the opposite side before you do the side next to it) and make sure you pull the fabric really tight! After those are in place work your way around in the same pattern doing a few staples at a time and pulling tight as you go! I used Jenny Komenda’s tutorial to help me with the corners (found here).

Trim the fabric after you staple and before you do the corners to make things easiest. Also, make sure your staples are not going to go all the way through the plywood. I used 2 layers of it to prevent any staples in guests’ backsides 😉

Cushion done and base done! Now to attach them to each other. The only way I could think to do this was wood glue. So far it has held up just fine! I squeezed one line onto each plank (don’t put too much or it will seep out the sides).

Put the cushion on and add some weight! I stacked on a bunch of books and left them on for about 2 days…only because we didn’t get around to putting them back for that long…

I think overnight would probably be sufficient!

Once you take off the books, you are done!! You can use the slots for storage as well. We will keep magazines, maybe some coffee table books, and it has proved to be handy alternative for our laptops instead of being eye sores on our coffee table.

The fabric I used is from fabric.com and is called Summer Ikat in Opal.

And when we don’t have guests over, our kitties sure enjoy it 🙂 This was my first upholstering project and the fabric placement isn’t perfect, but if I can do it so can you!