Comrades, I’ve come across a free source of pallets and scrap wood and the mutual aid homeless encampment project in my city is accepting them. My current efforts are to ferry the supplies to the camp weekly so that someone there can add on to the current structures.
Since I wanna get involved in building some shelters but I have very little construction or design experience here’s my question for chapo: Are there any good pallet shelter designs specifically for sleeping in and using as a tiny home? Most of the things I’ve found online are just imagines of finished pallet livestock shelters, but I want to find something that details the process a bit more.
I don’t think pallets themselves are good for shelters because they’re full of gaps, so the best thing would be to disassemble them and use the lumber to build something more sturdy. That being said, you could make small structures and wrap them in tarp to seal them up, but that’s not much better than a tent.
Probably the easiest thing to build would be a lean-to. Its basically a three sided structure with a sloped roof. Because it’s so simplistic in its design it can be scaled up or down in size to fit just one person or a dozen, and it requires a minimal amount of materials, basically just wood and screws, which means you can build more of them with the materials you have. The three sides do a good job of reflecting warmth, the sloped ceiling takes care of rain and snow while not trapping smoke from cooking, and they are usually on a raised platform which helps with rodents and heat loss. You can also hang sheets/plastic across the front for privacy without using up more wood.
