sit: Garden Bench

I tuned into ESP the other day and saw his very cool garden bench project. (Especially love the touch of the Mexican blanket on the seat.) Thusly, he turned me on to this garden-bench-design-month-extravaganza, which I can't pass up.

Here's the garden bench that John and I made awhile back.

It's great for gazing at the garden under the (growing) shade of the desert willow. It also happens to be long enough to lie down on...(In case you are wondering, that vase is full of Texas betony, which needed to be clipped, but doesn't belong indoors - the smell is not for the faint at heart.)

The bench seat is made of this huge hunk o' wood that I found at Austin ReStore. When I saw it I insisted we buy, but didn't have much of a plan. In swooped John with his fabulous sensibilities.

We had a bunch of old posts laying around from the P.O.s (more on that in a blog post to come), and he came up with this great design to reuse the posts as the base and legs. Here's a shot of that, with the cool industrial bolt.

Each leg is made of two post bits sandwiched together and the center rail of the base is the rest of the post. Now that the bench has been out in the elements for a while, it's growing shelf fungus.

I'll be sad to see the thing totally disintegrate back into nature, but on the other hand, what's better than something that you know won't last? And it's kinda cool to have rescued these pieces of wood and turned them into something more than just firewood or garbage...