Tuesday, April 21, 2015

DIY Cute Bench




Projects are something that Jon and I absolutely love to do at our new house. We like to set a project for the weekend (almost every weekend). The project is usually decided on by how many funds we have in the bank. Some projects have consisted of gardening, some of taking found pieces of wood from around the new construction areas in our neighborhood to make new things, etc. These projects also keep us at home on the weekends, which is something we love at this point because we love our new house! And these projects like this bring such a sense of pride in our home and in our marriage.

We really needed some seating area for the back porch, but didn't have lots to spend. Like hardly anything to spend. But we knew that Finn's second birthday party was right around the corner and we really wanted to have his party at our house. So, I started looking through Pinterest like I always do when I need to get ideas. Am I the only one who goes to Pinterest before Google now? I used to be the Google queen, but it has been replaced with the best thing since sliced bread! I got lots ideas about using cheap items that could be painted and put together from home improvement store, so Jon and I went on the hunt to see what we could find. We love the re-purposed look using pallets and old wood, but we heard that it was an absolute pain to rip pallets apart in order to make something else. We decided on the cinder block look. There were tons of ideas on Pinterest, but this one caught our eye and is what we decided to base our design off of..  DIY Outdoor Seating

It turned out better than we expected and check out the awesome coffee table that my husband made to go with it at the end of this blog! Full project could possibly take an afternoon, but it took us a two days since we had to let the paint dry between coats on the cinder blocks.


Our local hardware store had the wood planks at a pretty good price. We only needed three of these. The cinder blocks ran less than a dollar a piece. We needed 8 cinder blocks. 


Let the painting begin! We used the leftover paint from our house to paint the blocks and wood, which we felt like would make it look like it "went" with the house. 


Painting the blocks was a little bit of a headache. They sucked up the paint pretty quick. We ended up doing two layers using white on the inside of the block and the brown color on the outside. At least I had this cutie to help out!


Mason jar drinks are a must when completing this project! 


The wood planks painted very easily. We didn't sand at all, just applied the latex paint directly on the wood. After looking back, we did not have to paint each one, but we had the paint and the time!


We needed a little break so Finn could play with the neighbors. 


Putting the bench together! We had to saw about 8 inches off the wood planks to get them the length we wanted. We used a regular jigsaw. 


We liked the look of the planks hanging over the bricks. 


The final piece is complete. Disclaimer here... I was going to attempt to sew my own cushions so that we would only have to purchase the pillows, but we ended up finding these at Home Depot and went ahead and purchased them. We loved the designs and thought it would add a little spring to our patio.


Perfect for our cozy little backyard! We ended up having to put a piece of plywood between the planks and the cushion that we also cut to size using our jigsaw (my sister gave this to me about 10 years ago and we have been using the heck out of it lately! Thanks, Jenny!).


Then Jon made this coffee table! We scored the pallet piece already put together and this was the original size. It was perfect for what we were looking for! We wanted something low since the bench is kinda low. We already had the beadboard, but had to cut it to size using a jigsaw. The board was then painted with chalk paint, distressed (it was distressed more after this picture), and polycrylic was applied.

4 comments:

  1. Ya'll are too creative. I love this idea and like it so much better than a purchased piece of furniture! Great job as usual. AWC

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  2. hi i had a question about how u made your bench, what sizes are the cushions? im a bit confused on what size wood to get so i can try to fit a cushion plz help!!

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  3. I love the colors can you tell us what colors you used?

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