Roger Los
05-18-2006, 11:57 PM
I rashly promised my mother and my mother-in-law, who both live in the same town and are great friends, a wheeled garden bench for mother's day. I found a plan in an English book on garden furniture and the all-butt-joint construction certainly suits my front porch workspace. However, because standard pieces of lumber come in "odd" sizes in England, I had to do some fiddling with the design once I actually started building.
I spent about twelve hours building the two benches...two hours on the chop saw, three hours with a jig saw (32 boards needed curves cut, from simple to relatively complex, for me), and about five hours assembling...though the second bench took half the time that the first one did.
One irritating thing is that I used their material list and simply doubled it. I either made a huge mistake or they allowed for a staggering amount of waste, I have enough left over to build a third!
Here's the raw materials for one bench, cut to size and shaped:
http://rogerlos.org/junk/bench/raw.jpg
And here's a single bench:
http://rogerlos.org/junk/bench/bench.jpg
And of course, here's the set, one per mom:
http://rogerlos.org/junk/bench/benches.jpg
I think they cost about $150 apiece to build out of western red cedar. If I was less pressed for time at the moment I would have done a smarter job ensuring all the screwheads aligned, along with pre-drilling all the screw holes, but I just used stainless deck screws directly...not too many splits, thankfully.
I spent about twelve hours building the two benches...two hours on the chop saw, three hours with a jig saw (32 boards needed curves cut, from simple to relatively complex, for me), and about five hours assembling...though the second bench took half the time that the first one did.
One irritating thing is that I used their material list and simply doubled it. I either made a huge mistake or they allowed for a staggering amount of waste, I have enough left over to build a third!
Here's the raw materials for one bench, cut to size and shaped:
http://rogerlos.org/junk/bench/raw.jpg
And here's a single bench:
http://rogerlos.org/junk/bench/bench.jpg
And of course, here's the set, one per mom:
http://rogerlos.org/junk/bench/benches.jpg
I think they cost about $150 apiece to build out of western red cedar. If I was less pressed for time at the moment I would have done a smarter job ensuring all the screwheads aligned, along with pre-drilling all the screw holes, but I just used stainless deck screws directly...not too many splits, thankfully.