My First Piece of Furniture!

I can't tell you how excited I am to share this next project! Over a {year} ago, I picked up a beautiful spindle bed frame at a garage sale, with the intention of turning it into a bench. If you google "headboard bench" you'll probably find lots of posts about these pretty little creations, and I found inspiration on several blogs myself. Finally, over the weekend, I got started on making my own (with help from the hubband, of course...).

I'd show you the end result now...but I want it to be a surprise, soooo... ;)

We started out by assessing the headboard & foot board. Both ends of the bed were exactly the same in size and shape. There was a broken piece on the headboard, and a missing spindle on the foot board. {Luckily} what was broken on the head was okay on the foot, and we knew that we could take the foot apart and replace the broken piece on the head. Not that it was easy to do...it involved a rubber mallet, a carefully used sledge-hammer and a lot of pounding, but we did it!





Once that was done, we built a box to use as the base of the seat using 1x4s, using an extra piece of wood in the center of the box for added support. Of course, I sanded all of the boards, and I got to use the compound miter saw to cut the boards to size. (OK, so I only got to cut a couple, but I did it!) We used a brad nailer (FUN!) for the box.




Then we put two boards across the top to finish off the seat. (Again with the nail gun.) We left a small gap between the two boards to that there would be a place for water to run through (since our bench is meant to be used outside).



Once the seat boards were on, we attached the legs to the underside of the seat using screws. Since we knew that we wouldn't be able to use the foot board to make a second bench, we went ahead and cut off the legs of the foot board to use as the front legs of the bench. After we attached the legs to the seat we went back and added some brackets underneath the seat just to make sure it wasn't going anywhere.



We then used some pretty serious bolts to attach the seat to the headboard....which I suppose I should start calling the back of the bench now! ;)



Here's what we had at that point.




You can see that there are several different colors of wood happening here, even without the unfinished wood we used on the seat. We filled the holes, then chose a brown paint (the name of the color is mudslide) and applied a couple of coats to the whole bench. And here she is!




I'm {thrilled} with the outcome! :) And it was fun to get to use a bunch of serious power tools in the process. Now I'm thinking about some sort of colorful pillow to put on the bench to give it a little bit of a pop. Hmmmmm.....