Try A DIY Wood Pallet Bookshelf To Organize Your Reading Materials In Style

Do you often find your coffers flush with extra wood pallets? Whether you run a small business that gets a lot of bulky deliveries, live next to a big box store that's giving them away, or are buying your own individual wood pallets online, there's much you can accomplish by repurposing the heavy-duty materials that go into these tools of transit. 

Let's say you have books in need of storage. Maybe the bookshelves you have don't quite fit them, or the shelves you're looking at are the wrong depth. In either case, pallets can come to the rescue, because they make the perfect material for bookshelves. 

For instance, Lady Lee's Home, a YouTube channel run by a single mom looking to teach homesteaders how to care for their property and farmland, posted one video showcasing a DIY wall-mounted bookshelf project that adds a rustic flair to any room by breaking apart and recombining the rungs of a wood pallet. Now, to be fair, this kind of DIY project can just as easily be accomplished with a handful of 2x4s, a circular or handsaw, and some screws. However, what makes pallets such a great material for projects such as this — or for that matter,  repurposing a wood pallet for coffee mug storage, or numerous other DIYs — is that (1) with pallets, you know the materials are guaranteed to be sturdy, and (2) the upcycling benefits of taking something that could've been trash and turning it into a cherished part of your home. The rustic look offered by a DIY pallet bookshelf is just icing on the cake, and while Lady Lee's shelf is certainly cool, there are plenty of ways to transform a wood pallet into the home decor of your dreams.

Lady Lee's own rustic decor is one option, of course, but if you have an undamaged pallet, there's an even quicker way to convert it into two wall-mounted bookcases: Flip it and you should see three indented rows of wood, designed to move a pallet jack or forklift through. Make three quick cuts through the indented sections closest to the middle, smooth over the split ends with sandpaper, and then attach a plank of wood to what would have been the full pallet's outer edge. This will act as the base of your cubby, with the stretch of indented wood screwed into the wall.

Alternatively, you can carefully break off each rung of wood planks using a pallet buster tool and reconstitute the pieces into a similar cubby shape. This will give you more control over how big your bookshelf becomes, and is easier to maneuver than an entire third of a pallet. Regardless, when you are hanging it up, try finding exterior wall studs for extra support, especially if you're storing heavy books.

There are plenty of other ways to design a reclaimed bookshelf. You can cut a square out of the pallet wholesale, smooth it over, and hang that piece with the top rung of boards against the wall, using support beams on the back as shelving. Or you can use your pallet buster to use worn-down planks of wood as the shelves for a traditional standing bookshelf. What's important here is that pallets make for excellent bookshelf material, and whichever way you choose to go about it is largely up to your aesthetic preferences.