DIY Park Bench Plant Stand

The DIY Park Bench Plant Stand was an idea conjured up by Amy. This quick and simple craft / woodworking project is both fun to make and takes only a couple of hours. The bench can be scaled to fit any planter or pot. The slats for the seat and the back are incredibly easy to make and the legs are as well. If you would like a pattern for the legs, you can find them on our website.

LINK FOR THE PARK BENCH LEGS

What you'll need:

• 1/4" or 1/2" plywood
• craft paint
• the pattern for the legs (or design your own)
• band saw, scroll saw or coping saw to cut out the legs
• table saw, circular saw or hand saw to cut out the slats
• nails and air nailer or glue and clamps

Often times a step is more easily understood when you can see the whole process. Take a couple of minutes and check out the short build video that we have included. It shows a lot more of the entire build.

We created our own pattern for the legs using Inkscape. The pattern can be found in our website article that is associated with this project. There are two files in the download. One is a PNG that is the exact size we used and the other is an SVG file that can be scaled up if you know how to do that.

Once you have the pattern printed and/or resized. You can temporarily glue it to a piece of 1/4" plywood. We used a glue stick, but there are also spray adhesives available that we often use.

There are a few different saws that you can use to cut out the legs. We used a band saw because it seemed like the quickest approach. Just follow the lines; simple as that.

If your cuts are a bit rough like ours were, you will need to do a little sanding. We used a strip sander to get the shape just right. While we were at it we made two additional legs.

The last thing that needs made are the slats for the back and the seat. We initially made these out of the same plywood as the legs, but the plywood kept splintering, so we ended up using another plywood that was not recorded or photographed. The concept was still the same though

We cut our slats 1" wide and 12" long. We sanded the edges and removed all of the leftover fuzzies. Then, we painted the slats green and the legs black, much like a common park bench. We used craft paints for both.

Once all of the paint was dry we nailed all of the slats to the legs, eyeballing the spacing as we went. The nails that we used were a bit too long in some places, so we just cut them off with some cutters. We could have used glue as well, but this was faster and held just fine.

While we were starting the assembly of the bench we thought that maybe it would sway side to side and not be very structurally sound. We toyed with the idea of adding some cross braces, but in the end decided not to. After we had it all nailed, it ended up be very strong. So we just left it as is.

That's it. There really isn't a whole lot to this project. It was quick and simple and we absolutely love it.

We hope you enjoyed this DIY project and the video that goes along with it. If you have any questions or comments please let us know, we'd be more than happy to help you out. Thanks for checking out this Instructable.