A Country Life for Us: Operation: Anniversery Suprise

Nathan and I celebrated our 8th wedding anniversery earlier this month. By celibrating I mean that Nathan went on a week long archery elk hunt in Idaho and Amber and I stayed home.

I decided to enlist the help of some awesome family members and to suprise Nathan with a bedroom makeover.

As a bit of background Nathan promised me when we were engaged that he was going to build me a log bed frame and headboard. Nevertheless, eight years later our mattress was still on the floor, we choosing to focus our time and money on other adventures and home/vehicle improvements.

Disclaimer: those pintrest diy-ers lie when they say that it can all be done in one day.....

I decided to make a pallet wood headboard and to sand down and paint our dresser and nightstands. We had exactly seven days to complete everything and get the room put back together before Nathan made it home. I knew it would be a lot of work but I totally underestimated how much.

We started out by going to my brothers work and picking out several pallets that looked like they had nice boards to work with. Pallets are great for projects because they are cheap (in this case free) but they are very labor and time intensive to get the boards to a workable state.

Free pallets!

After tearing the pallets apart I had to make sure there
were no nails remaining in any boards.

Each board was ran through the plainer six times to make
them all smooth and the same size.

While the men were running the power tools (plaining the boards) I got started on sanding down the nightstands and drawers with a 4inch orbital sander.

Original color of the dressers and
nightstands

In total it took me three FULL days to sand down the large dresser, two nightstands and 12 drawer fronts. My arms and hands were tingling for about a week afterwards from all the vibrations. Finally after watching me suffer, on the third day my dad pulled out the belt sander and made quick work of all the flat serfaces.

A 'Sam'wich, with 'cat'sup on top.

By the evening of the first day we had the boards ready and we were able to assemble the headboard.

One of the great things about working with pallet wood is that you get a variety of different woods to work with. We had fun mixing and matching the boards as we put it all together.