Hanging around: How to make a hanging shelf with pallet boards

This hanging shelf has an ethereal air to it because it seems to hang by itself with no anchor. Once hung on your wall, however, it’s solid as a rock and the ideal parking spot for diminutive vases filled with favorite buds, novels, and even your vintage salt and pepper shaker collection.

The fact that the DIY’s main ingredient is a bunch of boards borrowed from a wooden pallet make it perfectly imperfect, as rough edges, nail holes, and other irregularities abound. Once the process of weaving jute twine through a series of holes that you drill is complete, you’ll be startled when you see the instant change in this decidedly un-grand pile of boards once they're creatively strung together. The piece will be the perfect place to park bathroom necessities, nursery diaper-changing supplies, and even your kitchen spice collection. However you choose to use the hand-hewn hanging shelf, you can be confident it will corral whatever needs organizing in the spaces you need it most.

Materials
-Wooden pallet
-Hammer
-Dremel tool
-Needle-nose pliers
-Electric drill
-3/8-inch spade
-Jute twine

Instructions
1. Lay the pallet on your work surface.

2. Remove the top level of boards that go from one side to the other. Use the hammer to pry them apart.

3. Remove all the nails in the boards. Take out any you can with the hammer claw. If some nails are too embedded into the wood to grab their flat ends, trim the pointed ends coming through the other side of the board with the Dremel tool, hammer the pointy end so the flat end is pushed up from the wood so you can pull it out with the needle-nose pliers.

4. Attach the 3/8-inch spade to the drill and drill a hole into each corner of every board, leaving a tiny bit of room around the holes.

5. Lay the boards on the work surface, one above the other, horizontally. Thread the twine through the back of the hole on the upper left portion of the board that’s situated at the top.

6. Decide how far apart you want the boards to be vertically and allow that length of twine to occupy the space between each board.

7. Tie another knot and thread the twine through the upper left corner hole on this board, coming in from the front.

8. Leave some twine between the middle and bottom boards, tie another knot and thread it through the back side of the upper left hand corner of the board situated on the bottom. This time the knot will be under the board and not visible to the person standing above it.

9. Repeat steps 5 through 8, but thread the twine in the same way through the bottom drilled holes on the left sides of the boards, directly underneath the holes through which you just threaded twine.

10. Repeat the threading process shown in steps 5 through 9, but on the right sides of the boards.

11. The piece is now ready to be hung. The twine will form an “X” between each board when it's hung.