OTTAWA -- Being stuck at home during this pandemic has given people more opportunities to make changes to their decor and that's exactly what 16-year-old Erick Cole has done, in his own unique way. 

“I didn’t like my old room,” says Cole, “so, I just decided to rebuild one.”

Cole needed a change, but he didn’t want to go the usual route of shopping for furniture.

“I just started brainstorming ideas and I saw a pallet bed on Pinterest and I was like, oh, I can do that.”

He wanted to give his room a bit of an upgrade, so he took matters into his own hands—literally.

“I ended up building a bed out of pallet wood and my bedside tables out of some old crates,” says Cole.

Erick Cole side tables

He thought it would be more fun to do it himself by repurposing leftover wood, turning it into his own custom built bed, desk and tables. 

“I haven’t built too much, but I’ve always liked to be handy,” says Cole, “or, at least, consider myself handy.”

“Erick is pretty independent and has good ideas. He’s very creative,” says Adele Bisson, Erick's mom, who was all for it when he brought the idea to his parents.

“We rented a little U-Haul to go pick up some pallets at a nearby place,” she says. “Two dollars and fifty cents apiece.”

Cole says the entire project cost him $150, and took roughly 10 hours over three weeks to complete.

“The bed wasn’t that hard compared to the other things,” says Cole. “It was actually building the desk that was the hardest. We had to take apart the pallets and make sure it would fit on top of the file cabinet and then level it out, which took a while. Probably took four to five hours.”

Erick Cole desk

His hobbies don’t end with just woodworking.

“Right now I have some old boat motors that I’d like to fix up. I’m just going to hopefully do that and sell them,” he says.

The room is not only a hit with his friends; his family is also impressed at how it turned out. Bisson says she might hire her son to build some furniture for her room next. 

Although Cole was able to create and build his new furniture from scratch, he remains humble

“I wouldn’t say I’m good at it, right, but it's not that hard work, to be honest. I think anybody can do it.”