When we were cleaning up for our holiday BBQ, Jeff made a snarky comment about our junk pile of wood on the side of the house. He was right, it looked bad. This is roughly how it looked over there, though the wood was stacked next to the house, not spread out all over the driveway. (This is a photo from last fall, I didn't think to take a recent one.)
It finally prompted me to use up the last of the good pieces of scrap wood. Since we were planning to have a BBQ, I thought it would be helpful to have more seating, and because we still had some short pieces of pressure-treated 4x4, I was able to reuse
my plans from last year.
Jeff and I quickly sifted through the wood and found we had enough pressure-treated 4x4 to make two more benches and once we confirmed we could find enough long pieces, we spent about an hour cutting everything out. (We used whatever kind of wood was handy, without regard to the species, though most of what we had lying around was cedar and fir scraps from our
fence and
shed projects.)
Then I spent the next few days staining everything.
These benches went together pretty quickly. We decided to use fewer slats on the top this time around because we are hoping it will be easier to clean the seeds/leaves out of the gaps.
The old white bench was also partially disassembled/cleaned and restained with the green stain. I'm not sure how durable the finish will be since we applied green opaque stain over the top of the white opaque stain, but we won't be putting it back under the maple tree so hopefully, it won't need as much scrubbing.
The rest of the weathered wood I didn't think I would ever use went off to the dumps before the BBQ. So, while the side of the house still looks a little junky, it is better. I do hope we'll get the last of this stuff cleaned up this summer.