I have surgery scheduled for 2 weeks from tomorrow. So, I'm working hard to get my many projects wrapped up well beforehand, as I won't be able to do this sort of work for several weeks afterward. And I want these things finished.
This may be interesting to you, I was reading about anxiety concerning surgical procedures and women. Women tend to feel more like they need to get everything set in place exactly how they want before surgery, whereas men don't have that same sort of feeling. Anyway, I've been having some serious panic attacks regarding my own surgery. It's not a major surgery, but I'm very anxious nonetheless. I've been waking in the middle of the night feeling panicked for the last few nights.
Despite this stuff, I wanted to share my latest project. This time I've managed to coerce some help with parts of it.
The thrifted chairs I redid last summer just didn't thrill me. The wood seat didn't weather very well. I knew I'd need to redo the seats. But then I had another thought. What if I put the two chairs together side by side and turned them into a bench? I've seen lots of DIY chair benches online. I think they're a great alternative to a pricey new bench for the patio.
What I'm working with:
- 2 metal frame chairs
- used primed and painted cedar fence pickets
- used screws
- wood putty
- spray paint
I took the wood seats off of the metal frames, then went out to the yard with my husband to get a few fence pickets. We cleaned up the fence pickets and gave a quick sanding in spots. But mostly left the primer and paint in tact. At this point we laid the pickets out on top of the bare chair frames to see how many we should use and what the spacing between each should be.
We don't have very sophisticated power tools, just a drill, a sander, and a jig saw. This is where my husband's help was indispensable. We needed to cut the pickets down a few inches. I tried to use the jig saw freehand. But I'm just not strong enough to keep it steady. My husband cut the rest of the pickets to length for us. We then drilled the screw holes in the seat pickets as well as some bracing pickets to hold them all together.
I puttied the old holes (from when the pickets were attached to the fence), gave them a good sanding, and painted the edges. Once that paint was dry, I attached the seat pickets to the bracing pickets, leaving a super narrow gap between each slat.