The First Build - Garden Box

In the Spring of 2020, my wife developed a taste for gardening. She wanted to make much of our backyard into a vegetable garden, and a flower garden that would attract bees and hummingbirds. This meant some landscaping would be needed. Ugly bushes were removed and old tree stumps were ground down by a landscaping service, leaving bare patches for fresh ideas.

The first thing I built this year was a garden box. Probably the simplest thing one could build. I got some old cedar deck boards from a local Facebook group that re-gifts things for free. The boards were ugly, and were many different sizes. For a garden box, it didn't matter. I took the shortest of the long boards and decided that would be the length of the box. After that, I cut the boards I needed with a Ryobi jigsaw. I bought a Makita random orbital sander and removed as much old paint as necessary.

I assembled the garden box walls and added a centre section to give more support.

In the end, the box was 9' x 4' and 14" high.

No paint or treatment was added, as the reclaimed cedar boards didn't need it. The box also had some corner seats for sitting on or resting a coffee while working.

I was particularly pleased to have done this without any plans, very little cost (my only consumables were the screws). The sander was an investment. It was completed in a single afternoon. That gave me the itch to do more builds that could be useful around the house.