This project was another born out of distraction while visiting Habitat For Humanity ReStore in search of materials for one project or another. It happens nearly every time, I'm heading back to the cabinets or tile and this little voice in my head shouts,"Squirrel"! In this case a cute old worn oak headboard and footboard with a $5 price tag jumped out at me. As soon as I saw it a picture popped into my head of exactly what it would look like as a bench and I knew I must take it home. Like many of my projects born out of distraction, this one got tabled for a while before I could get back to it, so it sat in the garage for many months... okay about a year... in which time it annoyed the crap out of my beloved garage hogging husband.
I began by cutting the footboard so that it could be used as the sides of the bench. Depending how deep you want the bench to be, you can either cut it in half, or take a strip out of the middle to get the desired width for the sides.
The next step was to cut wood to build a seat box. You can use 2x4's, but I just used what I had in my scrap pile, which was slightly smaller. Cut the 4 strips according to your desired dimensions so that the seat box can be attached to the headboard flush on the sides.
Next, you want to attach your pieces to build your seat box. If you are using 2x4's you should be able to assemble the box with screws. I opted to use some "L" brackets because my boards were smaller than 2x4 and I wanted to avoid splitting. You can see that my shorter cuts for the side are thinner than the longer front and back pieces and that is because I was using wood from my scrap pile. The thicker pieces were the leftover crosspieces from a cedar picket fence panel and the thinner pieces were once part of a sofa that we dismantled for recycling.
I then attached the seat box directly to the bench back (headboard). I measured and attached it to achieve a 17" standard seat height.
Next step, attach the footboard sides fastening it to both the sides of the headboard and the seat box. I chose to add some additional "L" brackets to the underside of the seat box and headboard/footboard pieces for added support.
Lastly, I cut some scrap boards from the kids old play structure to form the seat top and fastened them to the seat box.
Finally, the fun part! I used Rustoleum outdoor/indoor paint in Maui Blue to give this little salvage scrap bench a fun pop of color. I used one yard of outdoor fabric in a fun print to sew a seat pad cover,which I then stuffed with an old queen size mattress pad.
This was a very quick and budget friendly project. Total spent was only $33
- headboard/footboard $5
- scrap wood $free
- paint $16
- fabric $12
- mattress pad for seat filler $free
Thank you for stopping by and I hope this post will inspire you to get out there to your local salvage store or garage sales and tackle your own upcycle project.
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