Reclaimed pallet cladding is the single most Instagram-adjacent thing we sell and the one most likely to go wrong, because people buy it as a pile of boards rather than as a prepared material. Here is what separates a wall that looks intentional from one that looks like an accident.
Failure one: no tonal sorting
Pallet wood weathers unevenly. One face may be eight-winter grey and the other raw pine; oak reads brown, poplar reads green-grey, southern pine reads orange. An unsorted pack installed as it comes produces visual noise rather than texture, and no amount of good carpentry rescues it.
We grade into warm, grey and mixed. Sorting is most of the labour in a cladding pack and all of the reason it installs without swearing. If you buy unsorted salvage, budget a day to sort it yourself before you start, and sort into three piles on the floor where you can see them together.
Failure two: incomplete de-nailing
Obvious and routinely botched. A single missed fastener destroys a planer blade, a saw tooth or a hand. Pallet boards are fastened with stem-threaded nails that resist withdrawal by design, which is exactly why de-nailing is slow and why people cut corners on it.
Our packs are de-nailed and metal-detected. If you are doing it yourself, work from the back face, use a nail kicker rather than a claw where you can, and run a detector over every board before it meets a blade. Every single board.
Failure three: no acclimatisation
Reclaimed wood is dry — years of service beat any kiln — but it is in equilibrium with wherever it has been living, which in our yard is an unheated shed. Bring it into a heated interior at 8 to 12% equilibrium moisture and it will shrink. Install it the same day and you get gaps in February.
Stack it loosely in the room where it will live, with spacers for airflow, for a week minimum. Two is better. This is the step everyone skips and the reason for most of the gap complaints.
The practical specification
- Sold by the square foot with roughly 15% overage for cutting and culling.
- Thickness varies across salvage — plan for a nominal and accept variation, or ask us to plane to a consistent thickness, which costs more and loses some character.
- Untreated feedstock only, documented, for any interior application.
- No protruding fasteners and no splinter edges on any face people will touch. Non-negotiable at our end.
- Fire performance: untreated wood cladding has a fire rating implication in commercial interiors. Ask your designer, and treat our material as untreated unless you specify otherwise.
What we will not do
Sand it until it looks new. People ask, and we will do it if pushed, but paying a premium for reclaimed wood and then removing the evidence that it is reclaimed is a strange transaction. The nail shadows and the mill stamp from Georgia are the product.
Quantities and waste allowance
Order 15% over your measured area as a minimum, and 20% if the wall has many openings or you want to be fussy about tone placement. Reclaimed material has a cull rate: boards that look fine in a pack reveal a split, a nail shadow in the wrong place or a tone that fights its neighbours once it is on the wall.
That allowance is not waste — the offcuts are useful for shorter courses and for the inevitable repair three years later when somebody puts a trolley through it. Keep a box of spares from the same pack, because matching reclaimed tone later is effectively impossible.
Thickness variation and what to do about it
Pallet deck boards run around five-eighths to three-quarters of an inch nominally, and the real variation across a salvage pack is wider than that. You have three options: accept the variation as part of the character, which suits a rough aesthetic; ask us to plane to a consistent thickness, which costs more and removes some of the weathered face; or install on a batten system that tolerates variation and hides it at the edges.
Most interior installations we supply go on battens. It accommodates thickness variation, gives an air gap, and means a damaged board can be replaced without disturbing its neighbours.
The fire question, which designers ask and clients do not
Untreated timber cladding in a commercial interior has a reaction-to-fire classification implication, and in some occupancies and some areas of a building it will not comply without treatment. This is a matter for your designer and your building control, not for us.
Treat our material as untreated unless you specifically ask otherwise. We would rather tell you this at quotation than have it surface at handover, and it has surfaced at handover for somebody else more than once.
Fixings and finishes that work
- Secret-nail or face-fix with a dark pin. Bright fasteners read as new and fight the material.
- Pre-drill near board ends. Reclaimed wood is dry and splits more readily than fresh timber.
- Hardwax oil or a matte water-based sealer if the wall will be touched. Avoid gloss; it makes reclaimed wood look like a laminate photograph of reclaimed wood.
- Leave a shadow gap at floor and ceiling. The material will still move seasonally, even acclimatised.
- Do not seal one face only. Asymmetric moisture exchange is how boards cup.
Jonah, millwork · Pallets Recycle, 1113 Ingram Ave, Richmond VA · published November 4, 2025 · 893 words. Corrections welcome — tell us if we have this wrong.