Pallet Animal Pen
When you think of farming it can often bring up images of a guy on a tractor, fields of corn, or chickens running around in the yard. And, often, that’s exactly the scenario at a farmhouse. Farm work can be anything from planting, to mowing, to building enclosures for containing outside pets. It’s all hard work but that lifestyle belongs to many people. Certain things have made it a little easier on the farm, like types of equipment and more modern vehicles. Another thing that makes it easier to take care of the farm is a pallet. When you use several of them, you can quickly build an efficient enclosure for outdoor animals.
A wooden pallet is something that is unexpected when it comes to building an enclosure for animals. You can buy pallets, new, or call around at large stores, like grocery stores, and department stores, to see if you can find them for free. The pallets you use don’t have to be in perfect shape but should be complete and intact. The amount of pallets you’ll need will depend on how large you want the enclosure to be.
Besides the pallets you’ll need re-bar, or pipe, to secure them. You can find re-bar, in various lengths, at a home improvement store. You’ll need a couple of lengths of re-bar for each pallet. The re-bar, whether purchased at a certain length, or cut to that length, should be as long as a pallet is tall.
To build the pen, stand one pallet up on its side, so that the front of the pallet is facing you. Stand it so that the boards across the front are horizontal. Slide a piece of re-bar into the first section at the top, and drive it into the ground. Do the same thing to insert a second dowel in the second section of the pallet. Continue to add another and another pallet until the pen is the size that you want. Secure each one with the re-bar. To make the last pallet function as a gate, put a piece of re-bar into one end of it, to act as a hinge, and attach a latch at the other end. Another option is to set the pallets any way you want them, and screw or nail them together. You can still use a piece of re-bar to make a hinged pallet as a door.
When you put re-bar into the pallets, it’s not a tight fit, so there’s some wiggle room with the pallets. To prevent that, drive a piece of stiff wire or re-bar, into the ground, on the outside, at each end of each pallet. That will prevent the pallets from moving if they’re bumped from the inside. Or, just set a cinder block at each pallet, on the outside. The pallet pen works for dogs, pigs, rabbits, goats, cows, and other outside pets. You can build it as large or small as you want; it will hold up for many years to come.
