'Trophy Husband' finds pallets quite palatable

Aug. 2—Moscow Middle School shop teacher JD Poulos said he first began working with reclaimed wood from industrial shipping pallets by chance.

He said his wife's stepson had picked a few up for a project that fell through and offered them to Poulos, who used them to build an end table for his living room. Now, five years later, Poulos's home is filled with homemade furniture and rustic accents that include some amount of the reclaimed wood.

Poulos said the material is functional for most projects and at times has a surprising, rugged beauty to it, but the major advantage is the most obvious, particularly in a time of sharply rising lumber prices.

It's free wood.

"Almost every business in town that gets shipments has these pallets, and they're free because they want to get rid of them," Poulos said. "If they don't find a place to go with them, then they're responsible for basically hauling them off to the landfill."

Poulos shares his process for woodworking, dismantling pallets and even creating homemade wood stain under his YouTube moniker, "Trophy Husband Woodworking." Videos can be found at the shortened link bit.ly/3id4ouV.

Poulos said the end table project that started it all set the stage for future projects. He said he and his wife were particularly pleased with the warm rich brown tone of the wood after applying a homemade wood stain made from vinegar, steel wool and coffee grounds. Poulos built a custom entertainment center for his home next, followed by a china hutch at his wife's request.

In the time since these early projects, Poulos has dug into more than a dozen other projects using the reclaimed material, including new bathroom cabinets, a dining room table for his mother and a murphy bed that can be folded into the wall when not being slept on.

Poulos even used the material to layer over an accent wall in his living room stretching from the ceiling to the bottom of a flight of stairs that leads to the basement. He said the work has evolved to include other features like reclaimed, corrugated aluminum roofing and metal piping — and he's far from finished with such projects.

"It just keeps growing — I just keep coming up with more projects," he said. "It's been a lot of fun. I've got hundreds of boards in my garage that I've already taken from pallets that I haven't even found a use for yet."

While he's mostly worked on projects for his own home, Poulos said he's also built custom pieces for coworkers and even helped a student from Paradise Regional High School build a coffee table for his senior project.

Now, whenever he gets a new batch of pallets, Poulos has a whole process for cleaning up the lumber. First, he uses a reciprocating saw to cut through the nails holding the planks to thick pieces of wood that hold the pallet's center together. He said this is less damaging to the wood than prying the nails out one by one — with only the top part of the nail and its head left in the slats, Poulos said it's a simple procedure to pop them out of place from underneath without damaging the wood further.

He said he runs each plank through a surface planer to create a uniform thickness and remove warping and then squares the edges on a table saw. The end result is rows and rows of clean lumber with sharp, square edges that look practically new. He said in some cases, he's been able to reclaim "gorgeous" pieces of oak and maple.

"(After) cleaning them up a little bit, if they didn't have nail holes in them, they'd look like they were brand new boards," Poulos said. "Some of the stuff you'd be paying a premium for because they've got different grain patterns and different characteristics that you would actually end up paying extra for — and here they are getting used to transport crap across the country."

Scott Jackson can be reached at (208) 883-4636, or by email to sjackson@dnews.com.

Trophy Husband Wordworking

Moscow's JD Poulos shares his process for woodworking, dismantling pallets and even creating homemade wood stain under his YouTube moniker, "Trophy Husband Woodworking." Videos can be found at the shortened link bit.ly/3id4ouV.