Homeless Girl Secretly Lived in a Pallet Home for 3 Years — And Turned It Into a Real Apartment 

Homeless Girl Secretly Lived in a Pallet Home for 3 Years — And Turned It Into a Real Apartment 

Nobody told Delia she couldn’t build a house. That’s the thing nobody talks about. Not the city, not the shelters, not the people who handed out sack lunches on Thursday mornings in the church parking lot on 3rd Avenue. The whole conversation about homelessness moves around what to give people and what to take away from them.

 Nobody asks what someone built when nobody was watching. Delia built a house out of pallets, a tarp, and 3 years of figuring it out the hard way. And then she turned it into an apartment. This is what that actually looked like. Delia was 20 when she stopped having a fixed address. Before she’d been staying with her aunt in a house on the east side of Spokane after a stretch that involved a job at a warehouse that closed, a roommate situation that ended badly, and a bank account that hit $0 on a Tuesday and never came back.

Her aunt was kind. She was also running out of room. There were already four people in a two-bedroom house, and Delia knew the math. She knew before her aunt said anything. Before she left before she was asked to, she took a duffel bag with clothes, her phone, no service plan, just Wi-Fi, a rain jacket, and $47 in cash.

 She didn’t have a plan so much as a direction. The warehouse district was quiet, mostly concrete and chain link, and it had overhangs. She’d walked through it before on her way to a temp job. She remembered thinking it was the kind of place where nobody would bother her. And she was right about that mostly. She slept her first two nights under a loading dock awning with her bag under her head.

It wasn’t cold enough to be dangerous. It was early September, but it wasn’t comfortable either. On the third day, she walked the whole length of the district and found the overpass. Behind it, half hidden behind a concrete pillar and some overgrown brush, there was a flat stretch of gravel that nobody seemed to use for anything.

She stayed there that night. Then, the next. By the end of the first week, she’d found the pallets. The The company that had moved out left a lot behind. Not much that was valuable, but behind the building, stacked against a chain-link fence that nobody had bothered to take down, there were wooden pallets, dozens of them.

 There some broken, some solid. Delia counted 34 that were intact enough to be useful. She didn’t know how to build anything. She’d grown up in apartments. The most construction-adjacent thing she’d ever done was hang a curtain rod with a borrowed drill. But she had Wi-Fi. She’d found a coffee shop four blocks away that didn’t lock their network. And she had time.

 Not in the way people say that when they mean they had free time. She had time in the way that people who were trying to survive have time, where the thing you need to figure out occupies every hour because getting it wrong costs too much. She watched videos. She made notes in the notes app on her phone. She read forums about pallet construction, about weather sealing, about how to make something that wouldn’t collapse.

 The first version of what she built took 11 days. It was three walls and a slanted roof, using the pallets as the frame, zip-tied together and wrapped in a blue tarp she’d found folded behind a dumpster. It was not beautiful. It was 6 ft wide, maybe 7 ft deep, enough to stand up in if she wasn’t near the walls.

 There she put a piece of cardboard down on the gravel for the first few nights, and then found a foam camping pad at a thrift store 2 mi away for $4. It kept the rain off. That first fall, Spokane got 3 in of rain in October. The tarp held. There she considered that a success. The problem with the first version was everything else.

 It was cold in a way the tarp couldn’t fix. The pallets had gaps between the slats, and when the wind came through the district, it found those gaps without any trouble. She’d stuff rags in the worst ones, which helped a little. But November in Spokane sits in the low 30s at night, sometimes lower, and a tarp over an open wood frame doesn’t hold heat.

 There she tried a second tarp layer on the inside. She tried cardboard packed against the walls. She found a wool blanket at a donation bin and slept in her rain jacket and two pairs of socks. None of it was enough, not fully. What changed it was insulation. A woman named Pat, who ran a supply stand for unhoused people out of a church van on Tuesday afternoons, mentioned once that construction sites throw away insulation foam all the time.

 Just scraps from new builds. Pieces too small to use, cut-offs. Dealia started checking dumpsters near active construction zones on the north side of the city. It took 3 weeks to collect enough. She ended up with pieces of rigid foam insulation in about six different thicknesses. None of them matching, all of them mismatched colors.

Pink, yellow, gray. Er, she cut them down with a knife and packed them into the wall gaps. She got a can of spray foam from a hardware store, $7, and sealed the edges. The difference was not subtle. The first night after she finished, the temperature outside was 28°. Er, inside she was warm enough to sleep in just the rain jacket.

 She lay there for a while before she fell asleep, genuinely surprised that it had worked. That was month four. What she built over the next 2 and 1/2 years didn’t happen in a sequence. There was no reveal moment, no point where she stood back and it was done. Most of what she added came because something had broken or stopped working or she’d had a bad night and spent the next week thinking about why.

Er, the floor came after a bad spring melt. Spokane sits at 1,900 ft elevation and when the snow goes, it goes fast. And that March, the ground under the overpass got wet in a way she hadn’t dealt with before. The cardboard rotted. The foam pads soaked through. She lost 2 days of sleep to cold coming up from the ground and spent a week thinking about it. He built a raised floor.

 Pallets again, laid flat. Two layers for stability, elevated about 4 in off the gravel on scrap lumber pieces she found at a construction site. Above the pallets, she put a sheet of rigid foam, two pieces seamed in the middle. And over that, a piece of linoleum she’d found at an estate sale for $2 the previous fall, rolled up and carried 2 mi on her shoulder.

 The floor was waterproof, insulated, and slightly uneven in one corner because two of the pallet slots were warped. There she didn’t care about the corner. The floor was dry. The door came after she had a bad night in a month. Eight when someone found her, not violently. Her a man who’d been drinking walked through the brush and stood at the opening to her space for about 30 seconds before walking away.

 She couldn’t sleep after that. She sat up until morning thinking about how exposed she was. She built a door out of two pallets hinged together with three metal hinges from a hardware salvage bin. $1.50 total. She cut it to fit the opening she’d framed. It didn’t lock. She couldn’t make a lock work, not well enough.

 But it closed flush, and she could brace it from inside with a piece of wood wedged at an angle. Not a real lock. Good enough to give her warning. After the door, she felt different about the space. She’d been calling it in her head the spot or the place or sometimes just there, as in I’ll figure it out when I get there.

 After the door, she started calling it without deciding to, home. The apartment part didn’t start as a plan. It started when she found a crate. She’d been walking a route she walked maybe three times a week, partly to stretch her legs, partly to check for useful things left out. People leave out furniture on trash days in certain neighborhoods, and she’d learned which blocks were worth checking.

 A wooden crate, about knee-high, solid and clean, sitting next to a recycling bin on a street in the South Hill neighborhood. She carried it back in two trips. She put it in the corner of her space and set her things on it. Phone charger, she’d found a battery pack at a donation center, water bottle, the small notebook she’d started keeping.

 It looked like a shelf. She looked at it for a while. She started thinking about what else could be a shelf. Over the next 4 months, she built two more shelves from scrap wood and pallet boards, a hook system on one wall made of bent nails she hammered into a beam, and a small table using two stacked milk crates she’d collected from an alley behind a restaurant, and a piece of wood cut to size.

 She folded her clothes into the shelves instead of leaving them in the bag. She organized her things. She put a small battery-powered lantern, $6 at a discount store, on the shelf at eye level. The space was still 7 ft by 6 ft. It was still made of pallets and foam and tarp, but it had a floor plan now, in the loosest sense of the word.

 Entry area, storage wall, sleeping area on the left. Three zones, no walls between them, but three distinct places. A woman she’d gotten to know slightly, another person in the district, older, who went by Wren, walked past the open door one day and stopped. She said, “You made it nice in there.” Delia said, “Thanks.

” Wren stood at the door for another moment and said, “I mean, it’s actually nice, like a little apartment.” She said it the same way you’d say something you hadn’t expected to say. That word stuck. Apartment. There’s something nobody tells you about living this way, and it’s not what you’d expect.

 The thing nobody tells you is how much you learn to notice, not abstractly, specifically. Delia could tell you which nights and which months the temperature would drop fast after sunset versus drop slowly. She knew which coffee shop kept their Wi-Fi up overnight because the router was near the window and the signal reached a sidewalk.

 She knew which church van came on which days and which one had blankets versus the one that had food, and that they were never the same van on the same day, and you couldn’t them to coordinate because they weren’t connected. She knew how to seal a gap in rigid foam with strips of packing tape and how that helped differently in dry weather versus wet.

 She knew that the worst structural risk in pallet construction isn’t the pallets themselves, it’s the zip ties which UV degrade and snap without warning. She replaced every zip tie connection with wire after the back wall shifted in month 14. She learned this by being there. By being close to it for 3 years. None of it was information that circulated. Not because anyone hid it.

Nobody was teaching this because nobody thought to it wasn’t a population anyone imagined building things. The gap wasn’t malicious. It was more like the knowledge existed but nobody had thought to write it down for this particular use. She wrote it down piece by piece in that small notebook.

 The apartment had heat by month 22. Not central heat. A A small propane camping heater. $19 second hand from a pawn shop that she ran for 2 hours before sleep on cold nights and kept ventilated through a gap she’d cut into the upper tarp layer specifically for that purpose. She’d read about carbon monoxide before she bought it.

 She took it seriously. The gap stayed open even when it was cold and she kept a small CO detector she’d found at an estate sale for $3 plugged into her battery pack while the heater ran. She is still alive. That’s not a small thing. The apartment had light by month 19. String lights battery powered draped along the ridge of the roof beam inside.

 She’d found them at a thrift store still in the box. $2.50. She turned them on the first night and sat for a long time just looking at the space. It looked warm. It looked inhabited. It looked like the kind of photo you’d see on a website about small space living except that it was under an overpass and the walls were made of shipping pallets.

There she took a photo on her phone that night. She still has it. The turning point, and there was one, even if it was slower than that word usually implies, was the day a case worker named Renata Lopez found her. Renata worked for a transitional housing nonprofit that served unhoused women and had been doing outreach in the district for several months.

 She’d heard from Ren that there was a young woman who’d built something on the south end of the overpass. She came to find Delia not to remove her or cite her or move her along, but because she was curious. She stood at the door of Delia’s space for a moment before she knocked. On the doorframe, which was a piece of 2 by 4 Delia had found and installed as trim, mostly because she’d had the piece and it seemed like the right thing to do, Renata later said, “The thing that got her wasn’t the shelves or the lights or the floor. It was the doorframe. She

said it looked like someone had made a home on purpose.” She sat inside. There wasn’t room to sit across from each other, so they sat side by side on Delia’s sleeping pad, and they talked for 2 hours. Renata asked about the space, about how it was built, about how long. Delia told her. Renata asked what Delia would need to not be here anymore.

Delia thought about it for a long time. Then she said, “Enough stability to get a job without worrying every night about where I’m sleeping.” Renata put her on a waitlist. The waitlist was 8 months long. Delia waited. She kept building. She added a second hook rail. She caulked the base of the floor where it met the back wall.

 After she found a small mirror at a thrift store, $1, cracked on one corner, and mounted it on the interior wall opposite the shelves. 8 months later, Renata called. The transitional apartment was on the second floor of a building in the Kendall Yards neighborhood, a 9-minute bus ride from where she’d been living.

 It was 340 square feet, studio, carpet that was worn down the middle, a kitchen with two burners and a half-size refrigerator, a window that looked at the parking lot, a bathroom with a door that closed all the way and locked. Dirdelia walked in, set her duffel bag down, and stood in the middle of the room for a while.

 The carpet was wrong. She could feel it. The softness was strange after years of foam and linoleum. Dir, the ceiling was higher than she’d had. The window let in light from a direction she wasn’t used to, coming from the west and hitting the floor in a long rectangle in the afternoon. She sat on the floor.

 There was no furniture yet that came later. And looked at the empty room for a long time. Not because she was overwhelmed, though she was, because she was taking inventory. Same thing she used to do in the pallet space when she got something new. Where does this go? What does this need? What can I build here? She knew how to live in a small space.

She knew how to make zones out of nothing. Dir, she knew what she needed on her walls and what she needed within reach and what she needed to see when she first woke up. She’d learned all of that under an overpass over 3 years of adjusting. The apartment took her 2 weeks to set up the way she wanted. Most of what she got came from the thrift store she already knew, the donation bins she already knew, the estate sales she’d been monitoring for years.

 She spent $94 total on everything in the apartment in the first month. Not because that was a goal, because $94 was what she had and she knew how to make it work. Nobody handed her a lesson out of this. She was 20 and ran out of money and built something because not building something wasn’t an option.

 3 years of cold nights, 3 years of adjusting, 3 years of a waiting list. None of that was grit or resilience or any of the words people reach for when they want to feel okay about a situation they didn’t cause and won’t fix. It was just what happened. And then a phone call, and then an apartment. Dir, she kept the receipt amounts in her notebook, which is how you can add them up.

 Foam pad, $4. Spray foam, $7. Hinges, $1.50. Lantern, String lights, $2.50. Propane heater, $19. CO detector, $3. Mirror, $1. Linoleum, $2. First month of the apartment fully furnished, $94. The total is $140. 3 years, one home, one apartment. $140. She kept the notebook.