Funny thing happened on the way to the barn wood wall

Funny story about the barn wood wall.

Last spring, I gathered the courage to tell Honey what I had planned for the wall in the loft.  I had been on the internets and I loved the pallet wood projects floating around.  I'd found a couple of blog tutorials, and armed with my websites and leads on where to find discarded pallets, I prepared to actually say the words out loud.

Honey took a deep breath, patiently watched my videos, and then said that's a lot of pallets.

I know! But I've been eying a huge stack of them just down the road in Neighbor's drive way.  They've been calling out to me for months.  They've just been sitting there all that time.  I sure wish I knew where he got all those.  Maybe if he wasn't going to use them all he'd let us have some.

Honey unenthusiastically said maybe.

Then a week or so later Honey and I decided to take a walk to check the mail.  When we walked by Neighbor's house the garage door was open and there were several more pallets stacked in the garage.  I mentioned that if we ever encountered Neighbor outside, we should stop and introduce ourselves {hint hint}.

And low and behold, on the way back from the mail boxes, Neighbor was doing some yard work.  It was meant to be!  We stopped, said hi and started up a conversation.  Eventually Honey asked him what he was going to do with all the pallets.

He explained, "Well, my crazy ex-wife wanted to use them to make an accent wall in our living room.  So I started bringing them home from work a couple at a time.  Then we got divorced and I'm not going to make the accent wall.  I was just doing it because that's what she wanted. I was just going to cut them up for fire wood.  Why do you want some?"

Honey said sure!  We'd take any of them he didn't want.

Neighbor asked what are you going to use them for?

Honey answered, "Well, my crazy wife wants to make an accent wall in our living room."

We made several trips with the truck and ended up taking all his pallets.  Then we started taking them apart.  Or trying to take them apart.  We worked about an hour to get about 3 pallets done before I realized that Honey's comment "that's a lot of pallets" really meant "that's a lot of pallets to take apart". 

Let me just burst your Pinterest bubble right now.

Pallets are HARD to take apart.  Honey used to sell industrial strength tools, and the stuff he had was just barely cutting it.  And it was taking SO LONG.  And half the boards we did manage to pull from the pallet broke.  Honey declared Pinterest dead to him.  He might have grounded me from the internet.

We left them stacked on the side of the house for weeks.  I'm pretty sure the deer thought we were crazy.

The day we decided to once and for all conquer the pallets was the day we got the phone call that Honey's mom passed away unexpectedly.  That sealed the deal.  We were done with the pallets.  On to bigger and better things.

Right before we moved, we spent a couple of hours with a saw cutting the pallets in to fire sized pieces.  We gave half the firewood to Neighbor and kept half for ourselves.  Best decision ever.