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A garden bench with your own hands is not just furniture for relaxing,and a subject for decoration of a personal plot. Thanks to the original street benches, you can create whole compositions in landscape design that will please the eyes of the owners, guests and others. This will be the easiest, affordable and exclusive option for your garden, so how to make a bench with your own hands is not difficult. It is enough to choose the right design and materials, choose the right location and attach a little imagination.
Finding the right place to have a bench.
Why is choosing a place so important for placing a garden bench? If the plot of land needs a bench, then a lot of time will be spent at this place. Therefore, it is very important to the view that will open in front of the sitting, and the surrounding atmosphere.
Current and relevant combinations:
- The benches for gardening made of metal and wood, namely those forged in a frame, perfectly fit into gardens, where there are many trees with large crowns and fluffy shrubs.
- Openwork romantic benches made of plastic or wood and metal are ideal for vineyards with young trees and flowering front gardens.
- Neat benches in minimalism style will be perfectly combined with a green fence, look good next to small artificial ponds and flowering beds.
- Wooden rough benches in retro style will fit well into the atmosphere of exotic plants, unusual curved trunks or just in massive old trees.
- A shop decorated with decorative objects, such as pillows, soft armrests, a fabric seat and other details, will find its ideal place on the veranda or in the outdoor gazebo. For such places, you should choose the design of the bench in the same style as the existing decor items.
- Under a large spreading tree, you can install a bench swing or place a classic bench with a back. You can place objects for sitting near the place where children spend their leisure time. It is important to ensure that there is a shadow.
Preparatory work: how to start
After choosing the optimal place to install a garden bench, you can start designing a future product. You need to start with preliminary calculations and planning:
- Sizing. When creating a bench with your own hands, you can use ready-made calculations of parameters that can be found on the Internet or design an individual model that takes a little more time.
- Thinking through the method of attaching the backrest. It is much easier and faster to make an ordinary bench without a back. But with the backs of the model look not only advantageous, they reveal a wide range for creativity and in operation is much more convenient.
- Foot Design. To determine this parameter, you need to rely on the mobility of the product. For example, stationary structures can be fixed in the ground with the help of cement.
Best of all, ready-made drawings and photos of garden benches help you to determine all the necessary parameters.
Overview of all kinds of materials
Garden benches with your own hands can be created from different materials, each of which has its own characteristics. Knowledge of these nuances will help to take advantage of each material.
Wood is considered a universal material for the creation of any furniture, including street furniture.
For garden attributes, tree species does not matter much, but it is better to choose varieties that are easier to process and are dry. A bench with its own hands from wood will look better if a part of the array is selected for it without flaws.
Plastic allows you to create lightweight products that are easy to move. This material is represented by a huge assortment of various shades. But plastic also has its drawbacks, among which:
- cheap appearance of the product;
- low reliability;
- susceptibility to fading;
- difficulties with the manufacturing process.
If you have soldering skills, the process of creating a product is greatly simplified, you can also use liquid nails for fastening.
Stone gives ready-made shops a very unusual look and a special refinement. Objects for the rest are ideal for any style of already decorated landscape.
But this material is more suitable for well-established production, since making a shop with your own hands out of stone is much more difficult than from other materials. In addition, the stone also has several drawbacks:
- difficulties in movement;
- surface hardness and lack of comfort while sitting;
- bare stone surface is harmful to health if you sit on it without additional insulation.
Metal always in landscape design looks elegant. Self-made forging will make the shop an ideal place for your garden.
Very often in finished products a combination of metal with other materials is used, most often with wood, glass also looks great.
The main criteria for the correct bench
Any bench with your own hands should not only be the best decoration for your garden, but also meet a number of requirements:
- Be safe - you should not make mistakes or inaccurate calculations when designing. If the design of the product is unreliable, you can feel discomfort and undergo increased trauma during operation. Therefore, you need to choose only high-quality materials, fasteners and accessories.
- Resistance to external factors - in order to increase the durability and preservation of the original appearance, one should prefer solid materials. If it is intended to construct a bench made of wood, then additional processing of the material is necessary, which will give it reliable protection.
- Comfort is a basic requirement for any seating or rest area. Therefore, such a moment should be taken care of in advance at the planning stage.
Creating a bench from pallets
The simplest and most affordable version of the bench with wood is a product made from pallets. If you add a little imagination in the process, you can get a unique and original subject for the landscape. It will be enough 3-4 wooden pallets, some of them will have to be divided into several parts.
The simplest option is to hold two pallets perpendicularly, which results in a seat and backrest.
Since the pallets are rather bulky so that the construction as a result does not turn out to be coarse and large, the pallets must be cut to size.
All the details of the bench will be connected by screws. With the help of screws, the side rails are attached to give the product greater reliability and durability, as well as the legs of the bench.
The pallets themselves are rough, rough and unworked material, so additional grinding is required to avoid further splinters.
The final stage of creating such a bench is coating with paint or varnish. For the convenience of sitting, you can arrange the soft capes or pillows.
Bench from old unused chairs
You can create garden benches with your own hands from any available materials, for example, they can be old unwanted chairs. For the finished product will need 4 chairs with backs.
Seats are removed from all of them, two more have parts from the front.
For others, it is necessary to cut off the front legs under the base of the seat.
Billets must be cleaned of old paint or varnish using a special solvent. When the coating softens, it is removed with a spatula.
The next step is to create holes for dowels. They need to drill in racks on the front and front sides.
Into the prepared holes are inserted dowels, previously spread with glue.
After the glue dries, you can approach the collection of the base of the bench. For increase in durability of a structure are used for a fastening self-tapping screws. On the surface of the future product you need to walk sandpaper.
For a bench seat, you need to additionally pick up a board that is appropriate in size, and cut off the excess on it. You can use several narrow boards, which are fastened together with wood glue.
The surface itself is also fixed to the base with wood glue. For better bonding on top of the board are heavy objects.
After the glue has completely dried, it is necessary to block the seat with masking tape and cover the rest of the structure with wood paint.
After drying, the adhesive tape can be removed, and the boards can be opened with a stain.
The final step is to cover the entire bench with varnish.
Turning a log into a bench
For such a bench with your own hands from wood, the drawings will be superfluous. Here you can fully trust your own imagination and creativity. You will need a log of any shape that you like, about 1 meter long and a chainsaw. The thicker the log, the more spacious the shop.
On the log you need to put a markup to cut it into 2 unequal parts. The smaller one will go back and the larger one will be used as a seat. Using a chainsaw, a log is sawn at the mark and all irregularities are immediately removed.
Then, in the parts obtained, you need to cut a triangular part, which will be used as a fastener called “dovetail”.These grooves cut out and in the seat and in the back.
The resulting triangular stratum must be cut into parts and inserted into the holes of the future seat, and at the top fastened in the back. DIY shop is almost ready, you just have to decorate it.
You can use small logs as legs, fixing a bench tightly on them, or experiment with other options.
Bench made of metal
You can make not only wooden benches, but also metal benches on your own. The metal frame is most often used; it will not be difficult to make it even to those who have no experience in forging. To create a framework, the method of cold forging is used, in which products can be supplemented with any kind of details and decorations.
Creating a metal bench with a wooden base and back goes through the following main steps:
- Sizing - you can independently calculate all the basic parameters for a future project or use standard measures. In them, the length of the seat will be 1.5 m, width 0.5 m, and the size of the backrest 90 cm.
- Creating a frame. The first step is to make the seat.2 pieces of pipe 150 cm and 40 cm long will be needed. To increase the strength of the product, additional ribs of the transverse and longitudinal direction are welded to the pipes.
- Making legs. According to the standard scheme, the length of the legs is 46 cm. It is under this length that the pipes are cut. To increase the degree of stability of the interior item, you must first connect all four legs to each other.
- The design of the backrest consists in welding pipes of 150 cm and 44 cm in size with each other. When this stage is completed, the backrest is attached to the finished part of the product. The optimum backrest angle is up to 20 °.It ensures maximum comfort during operation.
- Polishing - cleaning of all available joints, metal polishing and ground coating.
- Preparation of wooden parts. These elements are mounted on top of the metal frame. They give the shop a complete look. They can be made of timber or planks, the size to choose the dimensions of the finished frame. The wooden parts should already be fully prepared, have a smooth treated surface without rough edges and damage.
- Binding parts. To attach the wooden parts to the forging, an electric jigsaw is used, it is also necessary to drill several holes in the base and wooden elements to fasten them. The fastening parts are bolts with caps of a rounded type and nuts.
- The final stage is the coating of wooden areas with wood stain and then varnish. These actions will help the material to serve longer and protect it from the negative effects of external factors.
Drawings of simple wood garden benches:
The finished bench will have a lot of positive sides. For example, ease of transportation - due to the combination of materials, the product will have a small weight, resistance to temperature changes, which allows you to effectively operate the bench on the street for several years in a row without damage to the appearance.
Ideas for street benches
A beautiful and comfortable bench to decorate the garden can be made absolutely from any scrap materials that can withstand the weight of a person. You can embody one of the proposed ideas in your landscape design:
- Using flowerpots with flowers as legs for a bench. Any suitable foundation is simply fixed between them.
- A bench of fastened sawn cuts will look very original. Cross-section logs of different sizes are fastened together, used as a seat and back.
- A lot of thin branches or bamboo sticks can be pulled and used as a kind of rectangular ottoman or divided into two parts, evenly distributing on the seat and back and securing with metal supports.
- Monumental bench of solid logs, which are used as a seat, and back, and armrests, and legs.
- The use of decorative or natural stones as the base of the bench.
- Bamboo bench - bamboo stalks of the same length must be pulled off with a strong wire. In the middle of the cut of them, leaving a place in the form of a notch for the seat.
- Brickwork as legs and armrests. A wooden board for seating is fastened between two small brick monuments.
- Decorative bench of stone slab and metal legs in the form of branches or roots of the plant wrapping around the seat. It looks very mysterious, but sitting on a stone bench will be cool even in summer.
- Wooden wheels of all shapes and sizes or metal rings can be used as legs.
Useful tips
When creating garden benches with your own hands, it will be useful to use basic recommendations that will facilitate the work and help to avoid some difficulties:
- when purchasing material it is necessary to consider the share of losses of about 10%;
- to save material and eliminate overspending, you need to start cutting from the longest boards;
- in case of deviation from standard sizes and creating a seat of greater width, consider the probability of occurrence of wood bends in the absence of a robust frame;
- to improve the safety of the product, it is necessary to eliminate in advance all pointed and angular edges;
- with the independent creation of all the drawings and calculations of the wood structure should be aware of the susceptibility of the material to shrinkage.
With such simple recommendations and lots of fresh ideas, anyone can create a bench with their own hands for giving or garden.