Driving to and from work over the years, I decided to build a fort with the junk I find along the side of the road. No, I am not literally going to build a fort, but I wanted to document the junk I find along the edge of the road and see virtually how cool of a fort I could build with it all.

When you first enter my fort, there are two rubber floor mats from a car and a pickup truck, that I found, They will make nice welcome mats for my fort, one is generic with no markings, and the other has FORD embedded on it. The frame of my fort is built out of the dozen or more 2x4s that I have found lying along or in the roadway. Some of them are actually straighter than what I find at the local Home Depot. The walls are made out of the 8-9 wooden pallets that I found piled up at a local intersection. I should be able to pull off the slates and cover the walls with them.

The exterior of the walls is covered with the 4′ long tan siding pieces that fell out of a truck a few months back, along with a 6′ white siding sheet that was lying along the interstate. The roof is covered in red and black shingles (and one brown) that I have run across, in fact, the red shingles I actually ran over. The rest of the roof is covered with green corrugated plastic roofing sheets that litter the side of the local roads. The ridge beam is made from the 4x4s that were along the road on the outskirts of town. I have several 3’x 3′ screens to cover my window openings. Speaking of windows, I can put to use the pieces of plexiglass that I have found and I am sure there is some actual intact glass in some of the windows on the side of the road, by the local dump.

Inside the fort, the floor is covered with used carpet cushion foam and used tan carpet that looks new and rolled up on the edge of the highway. There is a nice striped couch cushion to sit on, and a tan ottoman to rest your feet on. I have a mattress (pick the size you want, they are a dime a dozen along the roadways, including box springs sitting outside every dumpster in the country). I have cardboard insulating the interior walls, which are decorated with shoes and CD-ROM disks, and the rare but still able-to-be-sourced strings of plastic from an old music cassette. I also have a rain gutter along the front to collect the rain and feed it into one of the half-dozen trash cans and Rubbermaid bins I have discovered.

I have plenty of igloo water coolers and Styrofoam ice chests, a nice rake, a 6′ red garden hose, and a cool bubble gun (yep a bubble gun, now don’t be jealous).

Outside my fort, I have a dozen or more tires that I use as planters.

Now do not be jealous of my super cool fort, go build your own 🙂