Guest Post: Tom Jackson

I am very excited to have my husband, Thomas Jackson Petrino, as a guest blogger.  We have had so many great times with gardening this spring/summer, and many stories and experiences to share.  TJ loves a good project, and especially yet, a good deal.  

So, without further adieu, here is my husbands post! :-)

Fixin' my Wagon

I am happy to be a ‘guest blogger’ on The Yellow Pepper. We have been doing so much on our little farm lately that if time permitted we could write about it all day.  Here is the story of a project that I recently did that may be of interest to others.

I got a wagon at a garage sale a few weeks ago for $5. It was great for hauling stones, dirt, weeds and anything else that you dont want to have to carry. I had been using it as it was but found myself wishing that it had some sides to it so I could haul more without things falling out.  

So I made plans to get some wood and build the sides up.  I could have gotten a 10’ board from Home Depot or Lowes (I favor Lowes now for most things but that is another story) but as I planned it out I started to think about alternate wood to use.  I realized that I could use wood from an old pallet that a lot of the businesses have lying around and that are going to throw out.  I usually dont like attempting projects with ‘garbage’ materials since it can ruin a project that you are putting a lot of time into.  There is nothing worse than spending hours on a project working with inferior materials trying to get them to work and then come to realize that it wont work after all.  Hours of your time wasted and you have a piece of junk in front of you.  So when choosing old materials to ‘repurpose’ I had to make sure that all of the materials were in good enough shape.  That being said, it felt good to repurpose something that was going to be thrown away into something that will provide me with years of use.

Here is the pile of pallets that I passed nearly every day.  It is at Carolina Mower and Equipment in Pineville. http://www.carolinamower.com I finally had the time to stop and ask them if they minded if I took a pallet for a project.  They were very glad to let me take ‘all that I wanted’.  So I wish to take this moment and thank them!

This was going to be transformed into a cart.

Pulling the nails out was pretty much the toughest part.  You have to be carful not to crack the wood since there are usually a lot of nails in each board.  Pliers worked best to get the long staples out.

Here is the cart without the sides

As always, Zoe is always there to help with every project.

I got lazy with the photos.  That usually happens when I am working on something.  I never feel like stopping a bunch of times to take photos.

So here is what I left out.

-Take nails and staples out

-Appropriate the best pieces to fit in each side.

-Measure each piece and cut accordingly

-Set up glue on each piece.  I screw all of the pieces together but I like to add some Titebond on all of the wood to wood surfaces to ensure greater strength.

-Screw the pieces together.

-I then screwed boards on the bottom so that the ‘box’ would stay on the cart. (see photo)

Here is the completed cart

I could have stopped there but I found half a can of wood sealer and stain and decided to stain and protect the wood.  Just had to unscrew the bottom pieces and stain it separately. 

Here is the finished product.

Here are the tools that I used.

So, since I had all of the other tools and got the wood for free, when it was all done, it only cost me $5 for the cart. It took a while but I learned a lot.