A pretty big milestone was achieved for the shop, this weekend. The upper walls are done! My goal was to finish them in one weekend. I knew I’d create a big mess and I only wanted to deal with that once.
Saturday I worked on the walls from 1pm to 3:30 am with a break for dinner and that was it. Looking back (although I’m pretty worn out right now) it was good to keep pushing on into the morning because the last board went up a little after 9 pm, Sunday. It took about an hour to clean up and I was able to get a decent night’s sleep.
I had already disassembled 60 or so pallets and organized them planks by width. They sat, covered, on my trailer since then. I do still have two stacks of complete pallets and probably 60 sq feet of left-over planks because I wasn’t sure what type of waste I would accumulate. The planks ranged in quality/looks in the stuff I did keep. I just wanted to use the best pieces possible. I figured there would be a ton of waste and there was. Even in breaking the pallets down there’s a lot that went to the dump.
Your eye for quality changes when working with pallet wood. You start to see flaws, cracks and wear as a "good" thing. There's a line that's drawn determining what's useful and what should be tossed that's much different than any other wood I've worked with. It was a weird hurdle for me mentally.
If you’re the type that likes puzzles or art you’d probably like messing with a project like this. If you love climbing up and down a ladder 300+ times, then this is really a project for you!
Enough blabbering, here are some pics:
This old barn wood is the only wood I purchased for the project. I got it inexpensively and imagined running a boarder on the end walls to help with the corner transition between the ends and the center. It gets rid of the issue of mismatched courses.
First wall done. I figured out a lot of things with this one. It made the second end wall go faster.
2nd end wall. I was worried a bit that the three walls wouldn’t match, at first, based on how my materials were organized and how I was using them. This turned out to be wrong. However, later, on the big wall it became less about picking a piece I liked and more about making the pieces work. There was a lot of labor on the big wall.
With the two end walls done, I had to make a choice on how I’d run the ceiling J-channel. Either I’d run the channel up the the wall or the wall planks would sit on the channel. I cut a small piece and tested it in a few critical spaces. After that, I chose to **** it against the face of the wall.
I hid a rivet at the joint.
Ready for wood.
It became quickly apparent that I was going to need to prep the planks so it wasn’t such a puzzle. It was easy to do on the small walls but with the big wall it made sense to rip a few different sizes based on what I had. After doing that, things went smoothly.
Well, that's not wholly true. My compressor started acting up... or that is acting like it was dying. Not exactly something you want at any time, especially something so expensive. I'd pretty much take most other tool dying but that one. I'm going to start a
thread on it, elsewhere, because it I need to diagnose it. Anyway, I got it to limp along throughout the project.
You can see the differentiation just from these planks that came from the same pallets. I know this because some of the pallets I’d dismantle, which had a group of planks I definitely wanted to use, I taped the whole bundle together. Look at the width differences. This was the case for most of the pallet wood. After running them through the saw some would take an 1/8th and others a ¼ and others even more.
This is early on, too! That pile nearly doubled.
The first course was a mistake. It stuck out and not in a good way. This wood was really hard, which is why I wanted to use it so that if I bumped it somehow the bottom edge would take it. But I was short one wide piece. I had a few narrower pieces but I figured even with pulling a plank and attempting to make it look right, it still would look out-of-place.
I pulled them down and put in two courses. Fitting them after running other courses meant I had to modify and fit them. By now I was a pro, haha.
And that's it.
This week I'm going to tackle a few smaller items and maybe put up the J-channel for the low side ceiling.
I’m going to use some of the foam I used in the garage door. Tonight the plan is to address this area. The holes need to be cut so the reel guides fit and then I’ll get creative with the polyiso board.
I think I'm going to hang up a couple old signs and some Model T and A sheet metal and call it done.