Pallets – Jorgenson Companies Employee Builds Dream Fort

This may seem to be a little odd to share, but it does give you a glimpse of who we are and what we like to do when we are not serving our clients!  Plus who knows–?  It could give you and your kids an idea to build something really fun, and really cool this spring or summer…

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This is the story of our IT Manager Jason Pearce.  If you were lucky enough to have met Jason (either in the workplace or outside it) you quickly see that this man has a lot of things going on.  He is never bored; working on many projects at once–and trust us when we state he has A LOT of projects always going on…everything from renovating dilapidated RV campers to, well, building forts which is what this post is all about!

Jason had been wanting to build a fort in his backyard for some time.  It would be a place for his son to play and it just seemed like a cool project, so Jason began thinking.  And he came up with this initial drawing one day of what he envisioned the fort should look like:

Drawing

As you can tell, the ‘fort’ idea had later had morphed into an old town in the Wild West; complete with saloon and bank.  The next step was what he could use as materials and how he could keep costs down.

“I just thought about where could I find some used wood that no one wanted and it occurred to me that I could use pallets because they were everywhere and people were usually throwing them away,” said Jason Pearce.  “After I decided upon the wood from pallets, the rest was pretty easy.”

Well from this point, Jason did a Google search for “forts made of pallets” and discovered that he was not alone–apparently this wasn’t a new idea, seeing as how he suddenly found TONS of other pallet forts, pallet cabins, pallet castles, pallet clubhouses, etc, etc.  Here are two of the ones he found online that inspired  his design:

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This got him REALLY excited!

So Jason began his quest; every lunch hour he would drive to a different place in a different part of town and keep his eyes peeled for pallets that were in dumpsters or just laying about seemingly forgotten.  He’d either stop his pickup right then, get out and toss said pallet in the bed of his truck, or if it looked to be a few pallets that were being thrown out; he’d drive by after work to retrieve them.  Day after day he would undoubtedly return with several pallets.

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Once arriving home, he would disassemble them, separate them into good or bad piles and then stockpile the pieces until he was ready to begin nailing them onto the work in progress.

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Well apparently his lust for pallets knew no bounds.  Since he had sent out an alert to our warehouse managers with SchoolLockers.com and Buyusedlockers.com to keep an eye out for any pallet deemed unfit for future use (due to damage) and rather than throw it out, to set it aside and call Jason who would then arrive before/after work and pick them up on the side of the building!

Unbeknownst to many of us, all of this ‘hunter/gatherer’ thing had been going on for weeks without anyone noticing…that is until the day we went with him for lunch.

As we walked into the restaurant he began pointing out pallets and when questioned about why he was suddenly so interested in the pallets, he told us what he was up to and we admittedly were amazed with his new project!

Trust me when he began to tell us about this secret pallet project, we were quite astounded with what he was doing, which had apparently gone from a detailed scribble on a piece of paper, to a full blown CAD drawing seen here:

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Yep.  This is what Jason does, and he’s pretty good at it too, ensuring that each step of the process is laid out and all contingencies planned for.  So having ‘pirated’ all the spare and loose pallets from the Greater Salt Lake Industrial areas, he was ready and here is what transpired in his backyard over the course of several weeks:

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…and as you can tell, his son couldn’t wait for the finished Wild West saloon to be completed.

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Jason even had the signs for Kaden’s saloon laser-etched:

 

Check out the finished product below!

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Impressive.  Very, truly impressive Jason.  And from everyone here at Jorgenson Companies thought we would just pass this along to our friends, clients and others who may be wanting to do the same thing in their backyards this summer!