Easy to Make Outdoor Furniture

Making your own outdoor furniture is an excellent way to create a functional space in your backyard. The key to making outdoor furniture is to keep it simple with basic wood elements for the frame and homemade cushions for comfortable seating. Your guests will not mind the basic craftsmanship as long as they are resting enjoyably. Does this Spark an idea?

Preparation

Gather some planks of wood. Any type of lumber will do. Slats of wood are best for seats because they support more weight than plywood, but you can use plywood for the tabletops. Because the goal of this project is to use simple construction, browse your home and garage for scrap wood or old furniture pieces. Collect unused cushions, fabrics and other sources of cushion material to create a new seat.

Benches

Build benches with seat cushions for a simple outdoor furniture piece. Use vertical slats of wood for the legs attached to longer, horizontal pieces for the seat. Select long screws as the hardware because screws hold weathered wood together better and longer than nails. Although you'll treat the wood with a weather-resistant glaze when the project is complete, water damage may still occur so using screws helps hold warped wood together. Place the legs at the outer edge of the seat for a balanced sitting surface. You can increase stability by adding a leg under the center of the bench. Complete this step for a bench that is longer than 5 or 6 feet. When the wood frame of the bench is complete, add a weather-resistant glaze and allow it to dry before constructing a cushion.

You have a couple of options for the cushion. You can make an open-ended cushion that uses the bench as one of its sides. In this case, you will put the filling material over the bench, cover it with a plastic or natural fabric, and staple the fabric to the underside of the bench seat. If the natural fabric was not treated prior to adding it to the bench, treat it with a water- and UV-resistant spray to keep it from molding. Regions that experience a large amount of rainfall will benefit from a bench with a plastic or removable cushion. To make a removable cushion, sew a cushion the size of the bench seat and attach ties to each end so you can wrap it around the legs while it's in use.

Tables

Construct a tabletop with a couple of small pieces of wood slats or a single piece of plywood. You can also re-purpose extra furniture pieces, such as a glass tabletop, by adding it to a freshly built wood frame. Consider using firewood logs leftover from the cold season for the base of a table. You can stack them and attach them to each other to create a unique side table base structure. Build a three-dimensional open-ended rectangle for the base of a side table if you don't have an item from around your home to use. Attach the wood tabletops to the frames with screws.