Greenhouse Child Fence From Recycled Pallets

A short while ago I caught my 2 year old banging on the glass of my greenhouse, being an old greenhouse it doesn't have tempered glass so the decision was made to make a small fence round it to just keep him a little further away from the glass.

The plan was to pretty much 'wing it', I wanted something colourful and almost random looking. High on the list was to keep it very cheap!

Step 1: Get Your Wood!

I get quite a lot of old pallets given to me for burning in our Rayburn and tend to have a lot of left over bits so I decided that this would be a great start for the fence.

Rather than dealing with pulling the nails out I just ran my circular saw across the useable bits and ended up with a nice assortment of lengths ranging from 15" to 20" all different widths and thicknesses too.

Next job was to square up the bottom and put a bit of an angle on the top, I didn't want a point but fancied an angular shape so that my little one didnt spear himself on it either.

Step 2: Painting and Making the Panel

I tend to have an assortment of paint leftover from painting the sheds and fence in my garden so I just used those to give me some Green, light blue, brown and dark blue pieces.

As this didnt seem 'colourful' enough I took my boy to the local hardware store and let him choose some bright outdoor wood paint tester pots, we ended up with a Yellow, lime green, coral and a bright pink which came up great and really break up the dull colours.

I always try to get my boy involved in what I do so we had an afternoon of painting the bright colours (and his clothes, face, the floor etc), there is probably enough in the tester pots to get about 1 coat on 3 pieces if you dont use the paint on yourself too :-)

Once all the wood was dry I just screwed the individual pieces in a random manner onto a couple of pressure treated battens to make the individual panels. Although I wanted the random pattern I did make sure that the bottom of the pieces were all as level as I could get them.

Step 3: Fixing Panels in Place

I started by putting a post (I used 3" fence post offcuts I had that were about 3' long) in at the front corner of my greenhouse and another halfway down, this allowed us to fix the first panel in place and line up the second panel to make sure that the final post went in the right place.

Once the main posts were in place and the panels screwed to them we also put some smaller posts (1" pressure treated batten) in between the main ones to make the panel a little sturdier.

All in all, an easy job to do and we really liked the way it came out. I even had some pieces of pallet left over so watch this space for a few more smaller projects!