HOW TO MAKE A BENCH VOL.2
25 July 2017
You know all those pinterest ‘pins’: “Build a bench for $15!” “Build a patio from an old pallet for free!”?
They are all lying.
All this wood:
Came to me for absolutely free. Even then, I lucked out on the quality of wood – all the planks are solid and lacquered, and have been stored in such a way they didn’t get woodworm.
There’s enough wood to make two benches here, this one jumps at me first: The square headboard provides back legs and support, leg boards provide the legs and the seat is made of straight wooden planks.
But why then do I say the posts are lying?
Let’s start counting money needed to make a basic garden bench.
(the jigsaw can be substituted by any decent panel saw for £12, but it’s obviously faster)
Black & Decker drill is borrowed, and the jigsaw was free.
To actually build the bench, first we need to cut up the long plank of wood into two side supports (here 45 cm in length), then attach corner bracket to the supports using small screws.
+Tape measure £3
+Smaller screws £3
Workbench (Warped and old, handy, but not necessary, rescued from the back of a garage) – free
Pictured below is a mistake of drilling too hard into the plank:
Next two steps can be done either way around, but I chose to attach front legs to side plank (using nails) first, then attach the side plank to the backboard. The result was rather….floppy. A single metal bracket on either is strong, but still bends too much for my liking so I added a bracket on top of the side plank for stability.
Now, for the seat:
5 Planks connected with parallel supports underneath (fixed with nails). The thing is that planks are used are not the best because they are under-bed planks that are more “flexible” than desirable. But, the seat can be easily replaced if necessary. Then, I separately painted the seat and the frame.
The paint is B&Q Woodstain suitable for outdoors – it was also dug out of the garage and came for free to me.
Then I combined the seat and the frame using screws (directly drilled into the frame) on either side.
Final product:
Ta~da~.
Total potential cost: £150
Total actual cost: £28
Naturally, if we consider that I didn’t use all the nails/screws and I’ve bought some tools to be used in general, the cost goes down: I used roughly £0.60 of screws and £0.20 of nails, and only £4 of metal brackets bringing that down to £15.80, but I had to buy tools and screw/nail sets in the first place. Tools don’t really buy themselves back quickly in non-commercial setting: in other words, I would’ve not built this if I didn’t have the tools.
The benefit is that this garden bench is cheaper than the cheapest bench at Argos.com (£58.99), but I honestly don’t know how long it will last or how often it will be actually used. Here’s to long lasting BBQ season…
