With the cost of wood going up and down these days, starting a new grow space may sound expensive. But never fear, there’s a cheaper way to get your new space going and soon you’ll have the perfect spot to set in your amazing plants and veggies.
Scrap Wood is All Around You
If you’re trying to save money, then repurposing scrap wood, instead of buying new wood, is one way to go. You won’t have to look far for scrap wood either because it’s all around us.
The scrap wood you see above is old fencing that my Husband and I picked up when a friend called me and told me that she was replacing her fence. There was more but I don’t have an indoor space where I can store the my wood for my projects (yet!) so some of it was to water rotted. I’m looking to contain a 12’X7’ grow space so I still needed more wood. To compensate, I grabbed a couple pallets from my heap.
When choosing scrap wood you have to think about your purpose. Will you be growing vegetables or just plants? Do you want a polished look at the end? Or do you want something that looks. Bit more rustic? Questions like these will help you find the pieces best suitable for what you’re trying to achieve.
I’ll only be growing plants in the space I’m containing and I want a polished look, so as long as the wood isn’t rotted, I can pick as I want, according to length. I’d rather piece together longer pieces than have to mend lot of small segments. I then cut off the unusable parts with my mitre saw. (I cut the pallet with a hand held circular saw).
From there it was just a matter of mending the pieces and for that I used some scrap 2X4s. (I always seems to have left over 2X4s somehow. lol)
I already had some exterior wood screws on hand so the cost for this project was absolutely zero dollars, only time, energy and sweat. I’d like to emphasize on the sweat part because it was a pretty hot day. Sweat was running into my eyes even though I was working out of the sun, under my car port. But to get this done and also look at less scrap wood lying around makes it well worth it. I really didn’t want to throw it away if I could make something useful of it.
Next will be the task of sealing and painting it but I have to save that for another afternoon. Then I can get it transported over to where it will live permanently.
Your turn!
Once you start repurposing scrap wood, you’ll be enjoying the savings and having so much fun transforming mundane, discarded pieces of wood into life that you’ll never look back!
My hope is to finish this up within the month and I’ll be adding the images as I continue this project so just check back from time to time if you’d like to see how it turns out.