Studio Plank

We had a detached bungalow built for my wife's custom design studio. She wanted a barn wood style ceiling and we decided to use reclaimed pallet wood. The end result turned out really well and as usual we learned some good lessons along the way:

- Older pallets will have wood with the most character but will also be hardest to break down. I used a reciprocating saw and highly recommend that method.

- The downside of using the reciprocating saw is you end up with nail heads in all your boards. You'll need to tap those out if you're going to run the wood through a jointer or planer. If not, just leave them in. They'll enhance the rustic look of the finish product and save you a LOT of time.

- We used a water based stain. That makes for easy clean up but you get a flatter finish than you would with oil based stain. We compensated by thinning the stain out to various degrees. Between different concentrations of stain and the different absorbency of each board we got the mottled look shown in the photo.

- If you're not going to mill the boards, you will have small gaps between them. We used plywood instead of sheetrock and stained it a dark brown. This makes the gaps unnoticeable unless you're on a ladder and looking right at them.

- We sorted the boards into piles of similar width and used these to make rows. Our contractor used a table saw to rip the boards in each row to identical width. So, each row is a different width but the boards within it are the same width. This made for relatively easy installation while still preserving a mottled, rustic look.