DIY Fail – Quick & Cheap Pallet Shelter
I told my daughter I should have a whole blog section on DIY ideas I find on Pinterest, try, and fail completely at. But at least I get an ‘A’ for trying. Right?
Okay, so here is my latest. Us horsey people love Pinterest. Right? We love looking at ideas for the barn, and cool tack, and all the pretty horses. Well, last year I had my stalls full and got a call that an older horse I lease out was coming home. Yikes! I had no shelter for this girl. So I think to myself, hey, there was a cool idea on Pinterest to make a shelter using pallets and hog fencing.
My husband works in the construction field so I put in my order for a few pallet boards. We bought a couple hog panels at Tractor Supply and a tarp. I was ready to go.
First, let me tell you that hog panels don’t want to stay bent in an arch. One individual is not going to bend them over and simply nail them to the pallets. You will get frustrated, you will talk mean to the kid trying to help you, and then you will end up doing it by yourself. Long story short, I got it built-in time for old Blue’s arrival.
My inexpensive pallet stall was done and perfect. It even had a 5 foot covered area on the back to store hay, halters, etc. out of the rain.
Fail #1
If you are so inclined to build this project, you need to keep in mind the ends of the hog fencing are sharp and will quickly rip your tarp. Breezy spring days soon had the tarp flapping all over the place.
My recommendation would be to use either sliced pool noodles, or even better, the foam pipe insulators that already have the precut slice in them. Place the foam along the edge of the hog fencing and wrap the tarp around that. You can see I had to do some tarp repairs along the edges.
Fail #2
This shelter is NOT strong enough for large horses. At some point over the summer, I put my 1,400-pound gelding in there. He preceded to scratch himself on it and move one of the pallets about a foot out of whack.
Fail #3
This last fail did it in. Luckily this winter I had plenty of stalls and no poor soul got stuck out in the redneck paddock. This shelter is NOT snow safe. As you can see from the picture, snow will flatten it. Before the snow melted it was crushed nearly to the ground.
