Retiree’s colourful pallets are a pandemic pick-me-up

Craig Taylor’s work with old wooden skids started as a project with his kindergarten-age granddaughter

It started as a little project Craig Taylor could work on with his kindergarten-age granddaughter: Take an old wooden skid, add a nice but simple design, a little paint for colour.

Now his holiday-themed pallets have turned into a bit of a pick-meup during the pandemic for people who walk by his south St. Catharines home.

“We’ve met so many people that we never would have met before,” when he and his wife, Carol, go for walks at night, he says.

“And people always say, oh you live in the house with the Canadian flag. Or the Easter bunny. So they kind of recognize it and it’s nice to hear that people really enjoy that, you know?”

For Christmas, he turned some skids into Christmas tree designs. Then a heart for Valentine’s Day. A pumpkin for Thanksgiving time.

He admits Victoria Day stumped him. And don’t even ask about the Civic Holiday in August.

“I tried to think of something for the May 24 weekend, but what could I do?” he says, laughing. “I couldn’t quite come up with a concept, and other than Queen Victoria no one else could either.

“A case of beer or something?” Taylor, who retired from General Motors in 2009, doesn’t consider himself especially artistic, but he has liked woodworking all his life.

His daughter suggested he work with old wooden pallets, so he made a few designs for his church a few years ago.

After the pandemic started in March 2020, he and Carol helped look after their granddaughter, Stevie, now six years old.

“When she turned five, she wanted a tool kit for her birthday,” Taylor says.

“Not toy tools, real tools, and my daughter-in-law thought this might be a great opportunity, if she was with us on Fridays, to make that her shop class.”

They made some birdhouses, then fashioned a pumpkin out of a wooden skid.

He’s made eight or nine pallet displays since. Finding the skids isn’t a problem, he has friends who use them for work.

“I don’t think of myself as being especially creative, but I like doing things like that,” he says. “I like people who can take things you normally would toss out and can make something from them.”

After 16 months in lockdown, his projects have become conversation pieces. For all the bad things COVID-19 caused, he says, it did bring some neighbourhoods closer together.

“All these people we’ve met on our journeys, on our walks, and become friends with, we need to have a big celebration with them” when the pandemic ends, he says.