Ali’s Pallet Christmas Trees
Hey there! We’ve never really done the whole pallet thing before, but I had been seeing a TON on Facebook marketplace for free, so I decided it might be time to give it a try; Christmas is right around the corner, so I wanted to give some pallet trees a chance to fill a void space that is meant for decorations in my living room. If you recall, I have a vaulted ceiling, and above the hallway space that leads to the rest of the house, there is an open nook type space to place decorations that I’ve been meaning to decorate for Christmas for years. However, I didn’t want to spend a fortune on it, so I decided to try out some Pallet Christmas Trees that you see everywhere at craft fairs. You also could make these pallet trees for your front porch, back yard, or even have them free stand in your home! I also want to say that this project cost me $0, so I would say that it was worth every penny! :D
Step One: Find some FREE Pallets
If you can’t find any free pallets, I would argue that you aren’t looking hard enough. We have a business right down the road from us that puts out a stack almost every week of pallets on their street corner, and like I said, Facebook Marketplace has a ton in our area, so find some free pallets! Depending on how many pallet trees you want to build and what size will determine how many pallets you will get. When you are finding the pallets, find some solid ones still that look like they are in good condition, otherwise the wood is going to break apart.
Step Two: Break Down the Pallets
I didn’t take any pictures of this but I should have. Before we became experts at breaking down pallets, Jake was just using a hammer and a crow bar to break them down. This works if this is all you have available to you, but our uncle actually told us about pallet busters (which apparently are a thing that we didn’t know about), but a much cheaper “version” that we got here. This is just the bottom piece, and then Darren welded a pipe onto the top for the handle part - so we DIY’d a pallet buster, who knew there was such a thing!
Step Three: Determine the “Look” of your Tree
I did two “types” of trees, but there are a TON of different ways you could make these trees - head out to Pinterest for some inspiration if you aren’t loving these. One way is your “standard” descent of boards with standard angles - basically what you would picture your trees to be. The other is a bit different with a 45 degree angle cut on both ends of the boards and meeting in the middle (pictured below). I only did one of these at the end, but this is by far my favorite tree and looks good mixed with the other ones.
Step Four: Cut Your Tree Pieces
Standard Tree:
First, figure out how big you want your tree to be and have those boards ready to go - for example, if you want the tree to be 7 boards tall, have the 7 boards ready to go. Then, determine the angle you’d like the edges to be. I did a few different angles on different trees to give them each a different look - I would say you are safe anywhere between 25 degrees to 40 degrees for a good look. If your miter saw can do those angle, adjust your miter saw to the pitch that you would like.
I started with cutting the top first to give me a start point, so I basically just cut a triangle using the pitch that I now had on my miter saw. You really could start with any triangle, just something to get your started.
After this is cut, you want to determine how much overhang you want with each board until it starts the next board. On my bigger ones, I did anywhere between a half inch to an inch. Here’s how you cut it then.
Put the uncut board against the cut board that will be above it. From each end of the cut board, measure inward your overhang length (red line). One you have that length on both sides, mark them with a pencil (yellow line). When you go to cut your board then, start your angle on those lines and go down and out from those marks (follow the red arrow), and then repeat this step with as many boards as you have. (TIP: Make sure you have enough width on each side of your marks to accommodate for the angles that are coming out - while I’m sure there is a perfect science to this, I just did a guess and check method).
You also could be very whimsical and not have it so exact and just cut - I prefer a more clean cut look with this though, which is why I decided to measure.
45 Degree Line Tree (Do you like how I named this?)
This one I did at the end as I was running out of pallet boards but just decided to try. Adjust your miter saw to a 45 degree angle and grab a board and cut both ends at a 45 degree angle that runs the same way - any length that makes sense to you as a starting point. Do you have the board? Great. Now measure how long you cut it from corner to corner, and do the identical thing to another board, but cut this one the same length. You now how it mirroring and can put it together in the middle to create a 90 degree angle. If you started with your top set of boards, just keep adding length now for the next two pieces down - I added about 1.5 inches to each next one. If you started from the bottom, keep taking away some length until you have the number of “rows” that you’d like.
Step Five: Sand
You could do this step, or you could not, but I gave all my pieces a quick sand at this point to clean them up just a little bit. We just used an orbital sander on these, but like I said, not necessary.
Step Six: Connect Your Boards
This step Jake did, and ended up running a nail into his finger, so please be careful as you do this next step. We just used a nail gun and some scrap boards for this step to get all of boards connected. We started by flipping all the boards over for the trees and running boards diagonally down each side to give it some sturdiness and ran the nail gun through the back end to get it connected. Then we flipped it over the front now that everything was together and ran some nails through the front to the back boards to stabilize it even more. (See below picture to see how we ran the boards. (This is where Jake ran the nail into his finger, so watch where you put those finger, because it is a guessing game on where those nails will come through).
Step Seven: PAINT
This is my favorite part of the project because these boards came to life!
I wanted to go with a little bit more of the distressed look on mine, but you could totally paint these out to be a solid color, or you could even stain them as well, which I might try in the future.
However, here are some tips and tricks I used to create the distressed look that is completely doable.
I use foam brushes on here - they don’t provide as much “coverage” which I prefer, so it gives it kind of a spotty/distressed look.
I prefer more of a light look, so I wanted some white on the “edges” before putting actual color on most of them, so I started with painting white around all the edges of all the trees except for the trees I wanted just white on.
I start with running the brush with paint on it in a straight, skinny line in a few places, and then I flip the brush to the wide side to spread the paint out. This typically ensures that not everything is covered and gives it a distressed look. You can keep stroking back and forth until it looks as you would like it. (See slideshow for visual reference)
I did a mixtures of white, eucalyptus shades and gray to give it contrast; I recommend going with whatever you are feeling, or maybe find some paint around the house that you have from a wall; all of the paint that I used I had from previous projects, which made this project totally free.
Step Eight: Make them Stand
Because we had two different “types” of trees, we had to do different stands for each of them. I wanted them so they stood straight up, so Jake took some scrap wood that we had laying around to create a “T” with some boards. He first glued them to the pallet trees, and then followed up with a nail gun where he could to give it extra hold (Pictured).
For the 45 degree tree, we did more of a stand, but didn’t want to do anything fancy, since we wouldn’t really see the bottom anyway. After they ended up finished though, I bet they would look nice if they were stained and you could definitely do something like this on your porch if you were looking for an easy solution. He basically took a scrap square piece of wood for the “trunk” of the tree, nail gunned that into place and then cut up some scrap 2x4 pieces for the base and screwed them together - see picture for pattern. Make sure your 2x4s are long enough to withstand the height and width of your tree, but you should be able to get a feel for it as you put it together. You also want to make sure you have enough weight on the bottom to anchor it, especially if you’ll be placing it outside.
Step Nine: Enjoy!
We put ours in a nook that we have open at the top of our vaulted ceiling in our main living space, but I actually had originally planned on putting them on our front porch, which you totally could do too! They feel like a forest; Jake decided to put some lights up there as well, and they will look great with the lights off and the real Christmas Tree lights on. Have I also mentioned that these are completely FREE? So if you get sick of them after a while, you can repurpose them again, or have a nice bonfire. Win Win all the way around!
