This project was ridiculously time consuming. After the success I had with the Sanctuary Media Desk, I thought, now I’ll make one with a tighter pattern, instead of boards 3 inches wide, I’ll use 1/2 inch wide pallet wood. The end result was beautiful, but the time spent was obscene.
First I broke apart a dozen pallets, with my slow methods, it was anywhere from 30 minutes to an hour per pallet.
Next I planned every piece of wood from approximately 3/4″ of ugly beat up wood down to 1/2″ of nice clean wood. Then I ripped the 3-1/2″ boards in half. I then chopped them to random lengths and glued them together into 12″ by 70″ boards. After they dried, I planned them flush, glued them to each other for the 2 foot by 6 foot top I needed. Finally I sanded, stained, and applied polyurethane.
After it had been installed for a week, I noticed that the top was curling, it wasn’t laying flat atop the cabinets. A master carpenter friend said it was because I didn’t polyurethane the underside, the polyurethane on the top was sucking the moisture towards it, and the bottom was drying out and contracting. So I took it off, and bolted angle iron to the underside to force it flat, then I polyurethaned the underside to seal it.