Bench

Several years ago my father made me this bench.


It's basically half a picnic table. Actually, it is half a picnic table (my mom has the other half). But it can be a table (which is what we use it for mainly) or a bench.

It's been sitting outside for oh like 5 years. Completely untreated. And it was starting to look... not great. I decided I wanted to stain it. Steve got out the powerwasher and went to town on it. It looked so much better just after the power washing. But still it needed help because there were tons of little splinters because of the power washing.


I headed to Wal-Mart and picked out some stain. And also got some brushes. Steve was annoyed that I picked out crappy brushes but I told him I wasn't planning on trying to get this dark mahogany stain out of these brushes after I was done so he was ok with that haha.

Steve had offered to help me stain the bench, but it was a rather warm day and he had been outside all day for work so I told him if he wanted to hang inside I was perfectly capable of doing this myself.

And so I went to town with the stain.


By the end of this project I was covered in stain. But that was because I forgot about the fact that this thing turned in to a bench seat and that I should probably do the back of it... but it was in table mode so I didn't want to move it around while it was wet so I started to just stain the back/bottom while it was in table mode. That really didn't last long because like I said... covered. Like I wasn't sure if I was going to get it off my hands. It did come off fairly easily which was great.


I'm pretty proud of how it turned out and I dug out some stuff that used to be on our deck at the old townhouse to put on the table. It's great extra seating or a food serving table for when we do BBQ's. I'm also really happy with the stain. I wasn't sure if it was going to be too dark, but I think it looks great and I'm sure the sun will fade the stain a bit.