Making Free Pallet Wood Shake Siding For My Tiny House On Wheels

I am making shake style siding using all free recycled pallet wood for my tiny house on wheels. This is free reclaimed lumber from old pallets. All I have to do is go pick up truck loads of free pallets and bring them home to work on my tiny house.

I was considering easier ways to use pallet wood to put siding on my tiny house. I had been considering using the 40 inch pallet wood boards in a horizontal pattern with vertical boards going upwards on each seam. This would give me a sort of board and batten look.

But from my studies, unless you have an overlap or lap joint at each seam, water will get in behind the boards. Then you must use spacers behind the boards to allow air to flow behind them and extend the life of the wood. Many contractors do not add these extra furring strips in order to cut down cost and also to ensure repeat customers later as the wood siding rots.

But for long life you should use furring strips behind the siding of your home.

Unless you are using shake style siding. In this case each board is overlapped and the rain will naturally run downwards off the wood and onto the ground.

Another reason I went with shake style pallet wood siding on my tiny house is due to ease of preparing the wood.

Taking apart pallets in order to keep the entire board whole is a big job. Each pallet takes quite some time to break apart and prepare. You have to pry off each board carefully in order to prevent splitting. Then you have to hammer out the nails.

I am using a circular saw to make the job fast and easy. I first mark out the center of each row of pallet wood. An average pallet is about 40 inches wide. There are three rails that all the boards are nailed on to.

So, cutting out around the rails and then cutting the boards in half gives me 4 boards or shingles per board on the pallet. One pallet can provide about 48 shingles on average.

This makes the work fast and simple. And I do not have to deal with any nails at this time.

Now I have a pile of pallet wood shingles that are about 9 inches long but in varying lengths.

I decided to have 7 inches of exposed shingle per board which gives me about 2 inches of overlap each. This should be enough overlap to prevent wind from blowing up under my homemade pallet wood shake style siding.

This video was shown in real time to show you how long it took me to process one single pallet and prepare the work area.

As I work I will get faster I am sure.

Watch for the next video which shows me processing more pallets in fast motion video.

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