A bench makeover…

I have been working on this project for weeks!

This is the only before picture I can find of this bench/footstool.  It has sat on my deck for probably 10 years…every few years I paint it again and buff it up, but this year the two corners of the wood slab top were rotted too badly to ignore. 

One day I decided to take the legs off since they were still in great shape and replace the top.  I tried to remove the screws and couldn’t (weakling), so I asked a friend to try.  He tried it and couldn’t either, so he told me it couldn’t be done without breaking the legs. 

OK, now one thing about me…when someone tells me something cannot be done, I can do it!  I have done all sorts of things because I was told they couldn’t be done.  So I went to Lowes and got this WD-40 Rust Release Penetrant spray after talking to a salesman about my problem.  

Most of the screws broke off, all were rusted badly, but after that WD-40 was sprayed on I could loosen the nuts and get the legs off that bench!

You can see how badly the wood is rotted here.

I started stripping the two thousand layers of paint off them when my friend offered to sandblast them (the same friend that told me that the legs couldn’t be taken off because the screws were just too rusted!).  They were so smooth and pretty when he brought them back to me.  I painted them with two coats of Valspar indoor/outdoor primer. 

Next I started looking for a top…boards at Lowes and Menards were either plywood,  too costly ($75!!) or not wide enough.  I needed a board that was at least 16 inches wide because of the space that the legs took.  I didn’t want to use two pieces of board until…my brother offered me a really nice 1 1/2 inch thick board (10 x 6) for free!!  This board was even rounded down one side but square on the other.  Perfect!!

So to make the top of the bench sturdy, I glued and screwed a series of 1/2 inch boards across the underside of the top.

Then I used copious quantities of some wood putty to fill in the imperfections in the wood; I cut the boards and they may or may not have been imperfectly cut!  At this point I debated about leaving the natural wood, but decided that I had used too much wood putty, I was committed to painting!

I still wanted the bench a rich blue color, so I used Valspar Deep Sea Diving spray paint with primer.  It was exactly the right shade!

Don’t judge and don’t be envious of my two buckets of joint compound work space!  Sometimes you just gotta do what you gotta do!

I measured and taped off a wide stripe and two narrow stripes and painted them off white.

I was so happy it was done I just sat down and looked at it for probably 20 minutes!  After it dried inside for a few days, I finally put it where it belonged!

Loving it!

The stripes turned out better than I had imagined they would!

The chevron pillow I made from fabric leftover from my mom’s pillows I made a few weeks ago.

The flowered pillow on the bench my sister Sarah made for me…it came in my last sister package. We exchange handmade gifts every other month.

I am linking to some of these great parties!