DIY step-by-step instructions for installing a bench in the garden

comfortable bench in the recreation area A do-it-yourself garden bench is not easy furniture for rest, and an item for decorating the infield. Thanks to the original street benches, you can create whole compositions in landscape design that will delight the eyes of the hosts, guests and others. This will become the simplest, most affordable and exclusive option for your garden, since it is not difficult to make a bench with your own hands. It is enough to choose the desired design and materials, choose the right location and use a little imagination.

Read also the article: do-it-yourself drainage around the house!

Finding a suitable location for a bench

Why is the choice of location so important for placing a garden bench? If a personal plot needs a bench, then a lot of time will be spent in this place. Therefore, the view that will open in front of the sitting people and the surrounding atmosphere are very important.

Relevant and relevant combinations:

Benches for summer cottages made of metal and wood, namely those that have forging in the frame, will 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, minimalist benches will go well with green hedge, look good near small artificial ponds and flowering flower beds.
Rough wooden benches in a retro style will fit well with the atmosphere of exotic plants, unusual curved trunks or just massive old trees.
A shop decorated with decorative items such as pillows, soft armrests, a fabric seat and other details will find its ideal place on a veranda or in an outdoor gazebo. For such places, you should select a bench design in the same style as the already existing decor items.
Under a large spreading tree, you can install a swing bench or place a classic bench with a back. You can also place items for sitting near the place where children while away their leisure time. It is important to take care that there is a shadow.

Preparatory work: where to start

After choosing the optimal place to install the garden bench, you can start designing the future product. You need to start with preliminary calculations and planning:

Determination of the size. When creating a bench with your own hands, you can use ready-made parameter calculations that can be found on the Internet, or you can design an individual model, which will take a little longer.
Thinking over the method of fastening the back. It is much easier and faster to make an ordinary bench without a back. But with the backs, the models look not only more advantageous, they open up a wide range for creativity and much more convenient operation.
Legs design. To determine this parameter, you need to rely on the mobility of the product. For example, permanent structures can be anchored in the ground with cement.

Ready-made drawings and photos of garden benches with your own hands help to determine all the necessary parameters.

Overview of all kinds of materials

DIY garden benches can be created from various materials, each of which has its own characteristics. Knowing these nuances will help you take advantage of each material.

Wood is considered a versatile material for creating any furniture, including outdoor furniture.

For garden attributes, the type of wood does not really matter, but it is better to choose varieties that are easier to process and are dry. A do-it-yourself bench made of wood will look better if a part of the array without flaws is selected for it.

Plastic allows you to create lightweight products that are easy to move. This material is represented by a huge assortment of all kinds of shades. But plastic also has its disadvantages, including:

cheap appearance of the product;
low reliability;
exposure to burnout;
difficulties with the manufacturing process.

If you have soldering skills, the process of creating a product is greatly facilitated; you can also use liquid nails for fastening.

The stone gives the finished benches a very unusual look and special sophistication. Leisure items are ideal for any style of an already designed landscape.

But this material is more likely suitable for established production, since it is much more difficult to make a shop with your own hands from stone than from other materials. In addition, the stone also has several disadvantages:

difficulties in movement;
surface hardness and lack of comfort while sitting;
a bare stone surface is harmful to health if you sit on it without additional insulation.

Metal always looks elegant in landscape design. Handmade forging will make the bench an ideal place in 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 a correct bench

Any do-it-yourself bench should become not only the best decorative decoration for your garden, but also meet a number of requirements:

Be safe - you cannot make mistakes or inaccurate calculations when designing. If the design of the product is unreliable, then you can feel discomfort and be subject to increased injury risk during operation. Therefore, you need to choose only high-quality materials, fasteners and accessories.
Resistance to external factors - to increase the durability and preservation of the original appearance, it is worth giving preference to solid materials. If it is supposed to design a bench made of wood, then additional processing of the material is necessary, which will give it reliable protection.
Comfort is a fundamental requirement for any seating and resting area. Therefore, such a moment should be taken care of in advance at the planning stage.

Create a pallet bench

The simplest and most affordable version of a do-it-yourself bench made of wood is a product made from pallets. If you add a little imagination in the process of work, you can get a unique and original object for the landscape. 3-4 wooden pallets will be enough, some of them will have to be divided into several more parts.

The simplest option is to bond two pallets perpendicular, resulting in a seat and backrest.

Since the pallets are quite bulky, so that the structure does not turn out to be rough and large, the pallets must be cut in accordance with the selected dimensions.

All parts of the bench will be connected with self-tapping screws. With the help of self-tapping screws, side strips are attached to make the product more reliable and durable, as well as the legs of the bench.

The pallets themselves are rough, gritty and untreated, so additional sanding will be required to avoid splinters later on.

The final stage of creating such a bench is coating with paint or varnish.For seating comfort, you can arrange soft cushions or pillows.

A bench made of old unnecessary chairs

You can create garden benches with your own hands from any available materials, for example, old unnecessary chairs can become them. For the finished product, you will need 4 chairs with backs.

The seats are removed from all of them, and two more have details from the front side.

Others need to saw off the front legs under the seat base.

The workpieces 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 the dowels. They need to be drilled into the racks on the front and front sides.

Dowels, previously coated with glue, are inserted into the prepared holes.

After the glue has dried, you can approach the collection of the bench base. To increase the strength of the structure, self-tapping screws are used for fastening. You need to walk on the surface of the future product with a sandpaper.

To sit the bench, 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 held together with wood glue.
The surface itself is also attached to the base using wood glue. For better fastening, heavy objects are placed on top of the board.
After the glue has completely dried, cover the seat with masking tape, and cover the rest of the structure with wood paint.
After the paint has dried, the scotch tape can be removed, and the boards can be opened with stain.
The final step is to cover the entire bench with varnish.

Turning a log into a bench

For such a do-it-yourself shop made of wood, drawings will be superfluous. Here you can completely trust your own imagination and creativity. You will need a log of any shape you like, about 1 meter long and a chainsaw. The thicker the log is, the more spacious the bench will be.

You need to apply markings on the log in order to cut it into 2 unequal parts along it. The smaller one will go to the back, and the larger one will be used as a seat. With the help of a chainsaw, a log is cut along the mark and all irregularities are immediately removed.

Then in the received details you need to cut out a triangular part, which will be used as an attachment called "dovetail". Such recesses are cut out both in the seat and in the back.
The resulting triangular layer must be cut into pieces and inserted into the holes of the future seat, and fixed at the top in the back. The do-it-yourself shop is almost ready, all that remains is to decorate it.

You can use small logs as legs with a bench firmly attached to them, or experiment with other options.

Metal bench

You can independently make not only benches made of wood, but also metal benches. Most often, a metal frame is used; it will not be difficult to make it even for those who have no experience in forging. To create the frame, the cold forging method is used, in which you can complement the products with any details and decorations.

The creation of a metal bench with a wooden base and backrest goes through the following main stages:

Sizing - you can independently calculate all the main parameters for a future project or use standard measurements. In them, the seat length will be 1.5 m, the width is 0.5 m, and the backrest is 90 cm.
Wireframe creation. The first step is to make a seat. You will need 2 pieces of pipe with a length of 150 cm and 40 cm. To increase the strength of the product, additional stiffeners of the transverse and longitudinal directions are welded to the pipes.
Making legs. According to the standard scheme, the length of the legs is 46 cm. It is for this length that the pipes are cut.To increase the degree of stability of the interior item, it is necessary to first connect all four legs to each other.
The design of the backrest consists in welding pipes with dimensions of 150 cm and 44 cm to each other. When this stage is completed, the backrest is attached to the finished part of the product. The optimum backrest tilt is up to 20 °. It allows for maximum comfort during operation.
Polishing - cleaning of all existing joints, metal polishing and priming.
Preparation of wooden parts. These elements are mounted over the metal frame. They give the shop a complete look. They can be made from timber or planks, the dimensions can be adjusted to the dimensions of the finished frame. Wooden parts must already be fully prepared, have a smooth, processed surface without roughness and damage.
Bonding parts. An electric jigsaw is used to attach the wooden parts to the forging, and several holes must be drilled in the base and wooden elements to hold them together. The fastening parts are round head bolts and nuts.
The final stage is to cover the wooden areas with wood stain and then varnish. These actions will help the material last longer and protect it from the negative effects of external factors.

Drawings of simple garden benches made of wood:

The finished bench will have a lot of positive aspects. For example, ease of transportation - due to the combination of materials, the product will have a low weight, resistance to temperature extremes, which allows you to effectively operate the bench on the street for several years in a row without compromising its appearance.

Outdoor Bench Ideas

A beautiful and comfortable bench for decorating a garden can be made from absolutely any materials at hand that can support a person's weight. Can be embodied in your landscape design one of the suggested ideas:

Using flowerpots with flowers as legs for a shop. Any suitable base is simply fixed between them.
A bench made of sealed saw cuts will look very original. Cross-sections of logs of different sizes are fastened together, used as a seat and backrest.
A lot of thin branches or bamboo sticks can be dragged and used as a kind of rectangular ottoman or divided into two parts, evenly distributed on the seat and back and secured with metal supports.
Monumental bench made of solid logs, which are used as a seat, backrest, armrests and legs.
Use of decorative or natural stones as the base of the bench.
Bamboo Bench - Bamboo stalks of the same length must be pulled together with a strong wire. Cut out some of them in the middle, leaving a place in the form of a recess for a seat.
Brickwork as legs and armrests. A wooden seating board is fixed between two small brick monuments.
A decorative bench made of a stone slab and metal legs in the form of branches or plant roots entwining a seat. It looks very mysterious, but it will be cool to sit on a stone bench even in summer.
As legs, you can use wooden wheels of any shape and size or metal rings.

Useful Tips

When creating garden benches with your own hands, it will be useful to use the basic recommendations that will facilitate the work and help to avoid some difficulties:

when buying material, it is necessary to take into account the share of losses of about 10%;
to save material and eliminate overspending, you need to start cutting from the longest boards;
when deviating from standard dimensions and creating a seat of greater width, one should take into account the likelihood of wood deflections in the absence of a reliable frame;
to improve the safety of the product, it is necessary to eliminate all pointed and angular edges in advance;
when you independently create all the drawings and calculations of the wood structure, you need to remember the predisposition of the material to drying out.

With such simple recommendations and a lot of fresh ideas, anyone can create a bench with their own hands for a summer cottage or garden.

Do-it-yourself bench with a back - video

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