DIY Canoe Stand

Want to get your canoe off the ground? Here’s how to build a cheap and easy DIY cane stand from old pallets!

We have a huge canoe that was given to us by Morgan’s family when we moved into our old house on a lake. Being on the water, it was the perfect place for a canoe ride in the evening and our guests loved using it.

We didn’t have a place for it. So for a few months, it just sat propped up against the fence behind our house.

Every time I cut the grass, it got dirty and it sat with its edge in the dirt. So, I finally go around to making a DIY canoe stand. This would also work as a DIY kayak rack!

I didn’t want to spend a bunch of money or effort to do this, so here’s how you can build a simple DIY canoe stand using free pallets you find on the side of the road!

DIY Canoe Stand

This is a super easy way to make a canoe or kayak rack with inexpensive materials and simple tools.

It’s easy to find pallets on the side of the road and make a project to store a canoe, kayak or anything like this.

Get our tips on where to find free pallets!

Supplies used for a DIY canoe rack:

• Pallets
• 2×4
• Screws

I had plans to build this completely from scratch, but I struck the dumpster dive jackpot at my office recently when a delivery came in.

This is the longest pallet I’ve ever seen, and it gave me a good idea for an easy DIY project.

If you have an extra pallet, try building this scalloped pallet planter!

I strapped it to the roof of my car and thought that it would be perfect for this project. I was essentially planning on building a 2×4 frame or even connecting two regular sized pallets (so you could do that almost as easily).

This long pallet was going to work perfectly as the horizontal supports because I wasn’t going to hardly have to do anything. Plus it was FREE.

If you can’t find an XL palette, measure your canoe and piece together regular sized pallets for the same look. Here’s how to get free pallets.

Here’s how it looked before.

The only thing that needed to be done was to level it off. Behind the fence, the yard slopes down toward the lake pretty dramatically, so I needed to level it.

Leaving the side that was along the fence on the ground, I lifted the front of the pallet to see that it needed to be elevated 11 inches to be level.

So, I cut two scrap 2x4s into 24 inch pieces to use as vertical posts. I attached these to each end of the pallet using decking screws. You might want to drill pilot holes before inserting your screws!

The reason that I wanted the posts to stick up past the lip of the pallet was so that the canoe could rest against them and be wedged in between the posts and the fence.

This wooden DIY canoe stand took me about 20 minutes to slap together. It would have taken longer if I had had to connect two pallets together or build a quick frame, but this worked out great.

Now the canoe is upside down and can’t get so dirty. Hopefully we won’t flip it over to find snakes in there one day!