I'm sure most of you have seen this idea. I certainly didn't come up with it. But there are many different versions of it on the web...and lots of ideas on Pinterest for sure (you can see a few on my 'Repurpose' board on Pinterest).
Last year I picked up this old headboard & footboard at a yard sale with plans of turning it into a bench. Truth be told I have a few sets in my garage :)
And last year I didn't get a chance to do anything with them. So this is the year!
I didn't take a picture of the headboard & footboard before I started (I probably have a picture of it from last year but I'm too lazy busy to go looking through my photos for it!)
But here's a picture of the bench in progress...
I'm not going to bore you with every little detail of how we put this together because it's already been done a million times for sure (I really liked this one). But you can see we used the headboard in back, then we cut off the bottom part of the legs of the footboard for the front of the bench, used a 2x3 for the side frame along with a smaller piece of wood to use as a ledge to hold the 2x3's for the seat.
Then we added a 2x3 for the front between the legs & added the decorative piece from the footboard for the front.
Now someone will probably wonder...why 2x3's instead of 2x4's? For one thing, it's a little bit of a cost savings. But more importantly, I didn't want to have any boards cut in half (lenghwise) for the seat because it wouldn't look right. So based on measurements if we used 2x4s the seat would've either been too shallow or too deep. Does that make sense??
Disclaimer: I say 'we' but ultimately my hubby did all the hard work on this. I supervised, sanded & painted but he did all the contruction. He did a super job :)
I went back & forth on what color to paint this beauty. At first it was going to be white. And then I remembered that I still had a bunch of paint leftover from our laundry room pedestal (post coming soon) which is an awesome gray so I ended up going with that.
After a little distressing, some poly, this is how it turned out!
I love the gray because you could dress it up with some bright, funky pillows.
And truth be told, if I don't sell it I won't be that upset...cause it sure looked really good next to my huge planter & the flagstone on my house :) Btw, that planter I won in a facebook giveway for Garden Springs Garden Center, a local nursery where I buy most of my flowers in the spring! Isn't it pretty?!
