My New Picnic Bench

The weather over the last few days has been glorious here in Cornwall. Bright blue skies and non-stop sunshine for the last 4 days and I have been making the most of the lovely weather because, lets face it, in the UK you never know how long it's going to last! Now, last week, I managed to obliterate the tussocks and the cut grass, which was really, REALLY long has been left to dry so it will be easier to rake it up and get rid of it and I weeded my flower bed which, quite frankly was in the same overgrown state as the patio and was an absolute disgrace! I also bought some weed membrane to put over the freshly weeded area to try and stop it ever getting into that state again and it was while I was sitting on the doorstep having a much deserved glass of wine on Friday night, admiring my hard work, when I got to thinking how nice it would be if I had a place to sit outside and maybe have something to eat. Sooooooo I grabbed my trusty laptop and set about looking for a table and chairs to put on the patio. Now, as most of you know by now, money is always tight for me and I have to be careful with every penny so, as usual, I was looking for a bargain. And I found this. A picnic bench for the princely sum of £48.99. It's not brilliant quality, the wood is a soft wood, not a hard wood and if left untreated it wouldn't last five minutes outside in the British weather but, I could afford it and I actually had a tin of outdoor wood paint in my cupboard just waiting to be used up so on Saturday morning, off I went to buy my bench. 

I had assumed that it would come as a table top, sides and seats that just needed joining together but boy was I wrong! For £48.99 you get planks of wood and a bag of screws! Still, not one to be deterred by a bit of DIY I rounded up my tools and began to put it together. After a couple of false starts, when I managed to get one of the planks the wrong way up and had to take it apart again, the bench went from this ..... 

To this ..........

In about 4 hours. One of the planks for the table was a bit warped but by the time I realised, I had already screwed it onto place and I guess I could take it out and replace it with one that isn't but I'm not that precious about things so never mind. I was quite proud of myself. It's hard putting things like this together by yourself, you never seem to have enough hands to hold things in place and screw things together at the same time but I managed it and was quite pleased with the way it looked. I then went and fetched my parasol to fit into the hole in the bench only to find that some animal, a mouse I'm guessing, had decided that it needed some of this yummy green fabric to line it's nest with and had chewed holes in the canopy!! To be fair, it's really seen better days so it will do for now until I can make a new cover. I'm going to take the canopy apart and make a new one with some lovely floral cotton fabric.

Anyway, yesterday I unearthed the tin of "Natural Stone" outdoor wood paint that had been sitting the cupboard since I painted the gate last year and I slapped 3 coats of paint onto my new bench. Luckily the sun was hot and the paint dried very quickly so all in all it took about 3 ish hours to make it weatherproof. I'm very pleased with it.

And this morning I sat and gave it a test run and had my breakfast outside in the early morning sunshine reading one of my favourite books.