bed bench

I felt the creative juices over flowing after making a movie for Thanksgiving so I finally got down to business and made my bed bench I have been wanting to do for some time now.  I saw a picture on pinterest and fell in love with idea.  Of course I thought "I could do that."  so began another project.
First I had to keep and eye out for a head and foot board.  I found a few on my many trips to DI but I am so dang cheap that I never bought one until  I found this little beauty.  It was pretty close to the shape that I wanted and for $10 I caved.  I tried to talk the guy down to $5 but you win some you loose some.  So I had  this bed in my garage for a few weeks just nagging me to do something with it.  I had a couple hours on Wednesday so I went for it.

First step was to sand down the whole bed.  I smoothed it out with my little palm sander with a medium grit sand paper.

Step 2. measure twice or three times if your me.  I measured the exact middle of the foot board and cut it in half.  Try to make the cut as straight as possible.  I used my skill saw so that part was simple.

Step 3.  glue and screw half of the foot board onto the head board.  Make sure you are on a level surface.  I
also used a square to make it a perfect 90 degree angle. It is just as important to glue as it is to screw.  A lesson my carpenter father taught me. I screwed through the back of the headboard and straight through the new sides.  Pre-drilling is very helpful here.

Step 4. Glue and screw the other half onto the opposite side of the headboard.

Step 5. I laid my wood for the seat across the arm sides and marked and measured each board to fit perfectly.  I just laid the wood and marked with a pencil underneath then cut on my lines.
My home depot has wood that people have had cut and don't want so they sell them for super cheap.  I got each board for 50 cents a piece.

Step 6. I used little L braces under the seat so that I could use this as an actual bench and not just decoration.  This step is not necessary but I felt better giving it that extra support.  If you don't use the L brackets you have to screw through the top of the seat.  The brackets are inexpensive (.40-.60 cents) so I say go for it.

the underside of the bench and its laying on its back

Step 7. give one final sand to everything then wipe down and paint.

My favorite spray paint to use is Rustoleum x2.  It has more paint in it than any other can and it covers really well.  For this project I really wanted it "number 2 pencil" yellow, but I couldn't find it in a spray and I didn't want to use the other kind.  So I tried 2 different paints not the color I really wanted but still cute.  Too bad you can't mix spray paint like you can regular paint. (actually you can but its costly and you all know how cheap I am) I left some of the dark showing around the finials to give it a more rustic look.

So the whole project from start to finish took me 3 hours.  I could have done it in 2 but I had my trusty helpers so that makes everything take longer.

 Total cost of my cute bench. $18.

  It could have been cheaper if I didn't experiment with paint colors.
I put it on my front porch, now I just need some cute blue pillows to go with it. Oh well that's another project for another day