Diy: Pallet Lounge Chairs

Beautiful pallet lounge chairs made with five repurposed wood pallets and painted in red for an attractive look in your garden! A detailed DIY tutorial was made available by Titti from Shoestring Pavilion, keep on reading.

Materials & Tools Needed

Materials needed

• Four pallets of the same size, it will be much simpler
• One pallet slightly wider than your other pallets (check out the sizes of pallets worldwide)
• Scrap 2x4s or pallet scraps of the 2×4 kind

Tools needed

• Hammer and nails
• Elbow grease

Instructions to build this lounge chair

1. Take your four same size pallets and stack them on top of each other two-by-two. It’s not necessary to secure them, the weight of the wood should hold them in place.
2. Check that the remaining pallet (the wider one) is wide enough to fit as a backrest. A pallet usually consists of three parts: the top boards, the middle boards (often 2x4s lumbers) and the bottom boards. For this lounge chair, the top boards of your pallets should be long enough to fit as a backrest while still accommodating the 2x4s on each side of the chair. Concretely, they need to be at least the width of the chair plus approximately 4 more inches. If they’re an inch or two longer than that you don’t have to be so precise and it’ll make your life easier.
3. Now it’s time to dismantle the backrest pallet and here’s where the elbow grease comes in… Remove all the bottom boards of the pallet and the two outside middle boards. Leave the one or two (depending on how your pallet is made) 2×4 boards in the middle where they are to help you keep the top boards in place. Save all the removed pieces, some will be used later in this project.
4. Cut the remains into two halves. Make sure you cut so the boards will be in the same direction as your seat.
5. Take your 2x4s, either from another pallet like I did or use new from the lumber yard, and attach them to the top boards on either side. These need to be longer than your backrest so they can reach down and fit next to the seat pallets.
6. Prop your seat back up where you want it to go to decide how much inclination you want the backrest to be. I marked the incline of the supporting legs on the side so I knew at what angle to attach the legs later. I just reused the original middle boards (2x4s) from my backrest pallet for this. I attached the support legs to the backrest at this point.
7. Attach the backrest pallet to the seat pallets. I was originally going to leave the backrest unattached but it was a little too wobbly so I put a screw, one on each side of the lounger. It’s only attached to the bottom seat pallet, the top one is still loose and removable.

Additional Notes: Two months later I finally got to the painting part! Mostly since bright red paint for the outdoor furniture wasn’t a high priority in the spending budget. But last week I found Pratt & Lambert exterior paint in “Red Statement” for only $10 a gallon at our local Habitat store and the rest is history…

Now they just need some cushioning, a few pillows and I’m thinking a drop cloth canopy so we can finally start using them… These loungers were free except for the $10 for paint. I barely used a quarter of my gallon so I have plenty left for other projects. Not bad for backyard style!