You remember that post where I said we were going to be doing fewer projects? Yeah, I lied.  Sort of. Small House + Family Visiting + Beer On Clearance + Too Much Pallet Wood = Fun Project! I present to you our Mostly Pallet Wood Farmhouse Table with Sunken Gutter Succulent Planter (phew, that’s a lot of words…). In the beginning of time, here’s what we had: Pallet Overload First, we cut the pallet supports to 30″ long. These will be our table legs. [You can see what we call “pallet supports” here] Then, we cut 38″ leg supports from wider pallet planks and screwed them into the already cut legs with 2″ screws. You can use as many or as few screws as you’d like. We weren’t planning on dancing on the table any time soon, so we went with two. We stood the table ends up and connected them with an 84″ 1×6. We just screwed it (the 1×6) into the the top of the 38″ pallet planks, but we may be adding a block below for extra support at a later date.  We had to buy the 1×6 as pallets aren’t built in this length. Beginning to look like a table, eh?  Here’s where the fun stuff begins: We bought 3 8′ 2x6s (the box stores were out of 1x6s for some reason).  We cut one of them into 2 approximately 41″ lengths and the others into approximately 84″ lengths.  We made sure to measure before we cut, as the pallet legs were not always “square”. We screwed the 84″ sides into the pallet wood legs. We screwed the 41″ ends into the 84″ sides. [cue yard chaos and sunset] We knew, at this point, that we wanted to sink a 5″ gutter planter into the center of the table, so we built supports for it. We screwed a block into each top end support and then screwed two 84″ length 1x3s into the block. We cut a 1×6 in half, but you could just buy 2 1x3s, I believe. The gutter is 5″ wide, but we didn’t want it to completely fall through the gap in the table, so we spaced the two 1x3s about 4.5″. You could also just test fit (AKA Eyeball it) before screwing the supports in. Eek!  The next step was to dry fit the pallet boards. I do this mostly because the pallet boards are not even thicknesses. I try to put like-height boards together for as smooth of a table as possible. If you have a planer and a lot of time, you could just run them through the planer so they’d all be the same thickness. Alas, I do not. Here’s where I had a blogger fail- I failed to take photos of what the wood looked like before I inserted the gutter.  I’ll try to make it up to you with a diagram: 1.  We did not cut the four end boards on each side at all.  We just nailed them in. 2. We cut he boards in between the 8 [total] boards on the ends (4 on each side) so that the ends were flush with the 2×6 and flush with the inside of the 1×3 gutter support. The black rectangle shows where we left a space for the gutter. The white arrows show where we nailed. Repeat for every board in the center. Sand.  Polyurethane.  Repeat. Now, here’s how we dealt with the gutter: We measured and cut it to the desired length with tin snips. We chose a metal gutter, but you could probably do this project with one of the slightly cheaper plastic gutters. We bought separate little end-caps. The end-caps were secured with caulk and left to dry. We also drilled small drainage holes in the bottom of the gutter. We decided to bend the edge out a tad with pliers so that the gutter would have more of an edge to rest on when sunk into the table- this is the edge on the right of this photo (you can see the metal is a bit wavy). Last, we just rested the gutter into the table and planted away using the appropriate cactus/succulent soil for drainage. The gutter can be removed whenever we like. Some changes we are considering:

• Adding some additional supports underneath the gutter to support the soil and plant weight
• Painting the legs matte black instead of the oil-rubbed bronze I had (which looks blotchy)

For now, enjoy our nostalgic Mostly Pallet Wood Farmhouse Table with Sunken Gutter Succulent Planter: “How did the family dinner go?” you ask.  My very creative sister took this lovely photo which, I think, captures the aura quite nicely..  I threw it into the Waterlogue app on my iPhone (if you haven’t checked out this app, you should).  I believe someone called it “al fresco dining” with sounds really fancy… All-in-all, we had a blast! Have a beautiful day!

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