diy ottoman from a pallet

This has to be my favorite Pinterest project to date.  I have been looking for a large tufted ottoman that would complement our living room decor and fit the space well.  There was one ottoman in particular that caught my eye on Amazon but was in the neighborhood of $400.  Not really a realistic budget for us. 

I remembered seeing a tutorial on turning a pallet into an ottoman on Pinterest and somehow talked Matt into spending a weekend working on this impromptu project with me. So here we go!

I won't detail our step by step instructions because overall we followed this tutorial from Domestic Superhero who does a much better job than we ever could describing the step by step process. The biggest change we made to our ottoman compared to the tutorial from Domestic Superhero is the size, we did not cut down the pallet at all-we used the whole thing (it measures almost 40in x 40in) because I really wanted an oversized ottoman. This meant that our fabric was not wide enough to stretch all the way down to the pallet so we essentially created two separate pieces and used liquid nail to adhere them together. This might make a bit more sense with some pictures of the progress:

The picture above is the half of the ottoman that contains the pallet, we lined the sides with foam and covered the foam with fabric and attached the legs to the bottom of the pallet.

And this picture above is the top half of the ottoman, consisting of particle board, tons of foam and batting material and fabric overlying all of the that.  Word to the wise, more foam=more strength required for tufting.  I thought I would be able to tuft this by myself but Matt ended up having to do it for me.  That being said we love that we spent a little more on the extra thick foam and it was well worth the effort for the end result.

Here it is in our living room, I love the way it fills the space and coordinates with the rest of the living room without being too matchy-matchy.  All things said and done we spent about $180 on this project, due to the sheer size of it we needed a TON of foam ($$$-make sure you use a coupon for Hobby Lobby or JoAnn's for this), batting, and fabric  This can definitely be done for less if you choose to make a smaller ottoman!

Thanks for stopping by!

xo,
Steph