I'd forgotten to add this until I looked through my cousin Hannah's photographs on facebook. She's an absolute genius for taking a photo diary of this one as we went along. We were really excited about making these as we hadn't built anything together before. The sun was shining, the birds were chirping and we needed somewhere to sit in peace in the garden. And so, the garden chairs were born.
This chair has a twin, bit I think you get the idea. Hannah is my absolutely amazingly epic cousin from Australia. We share an interest in adventure and change, so while she was visiting England a couple of years ago, we decided to build some garden furniture on a whim. Decent garden chairs can cost a pretty penny, but can be built for a fraction of the cost when using treating decking boards and timber.
Inexpensive tanalised timber can be purchased at most of the larger DIY stores in the garden section and will cost very little. Be sure to purchase the planed version if you plan to build furniture with it as the sawn version will be very rough and will leave an ugly finish. We started with the sides of the chair:
They're upside down in this picture, but consist of one long back leg, a shorter front leg, a bar for the arm and a bar to brace the seat. We added 45 degree angled braces for the sections connecting the arm bar and the back leg, as you can see. When building furniture, make sure that the surface you are working on is level and check that your angles are true after every step. It's easy to correct as you're going along, but very difficult to correct an entire construction.
Although the timber had been treated, we knew that we wanted a bold colour finish, so added our chosen paint at points which we expected to be difficult to paint on completion of the build.
Next, we constructed a simple seat with three cuts of a decking board and two side bars, leaving a gap at the rear of the bars to allow space for the backrest. This is as good a point as any to recommend that you use decent wood screws. Reisser make particularly good quality Phillips-head wood screws, but they're a bit of an investment. Buy the best quality you can afford and they will return the expenditure by being more efficient and easier to use. Buy in bulk if you can as screws always come in handy once you've been bitten by the building bug!
After adding the seat to the basic side frames we then screwed a bar along the top of the back legs and a longer slice of decking along the front to hide the underside of the chair and add support.
I'm afraid that we forgot to photograph the next step, but we included lengths of timber running down the inside of the back support set at about an eighty degree angle from the seat. This was to ensure that our backrest would be very slightly tilted when in situ. We made a frame which mimicked the seat for the backrest with three slices of decking and two support struts, then screwed it onto the bare bones of the chair.
At this point, it started to look very much like a chair indeed, but still needed arm rests as it just didn't look like a slouchy enough space for us as yet. We measured the arms and cut two lengths of decking to those measurements. For the sake of soft corners, we cut a small 45 degree angle from each corner of the front of the arms and about a 20 degree longer cut from the back, sanded the rough edges, then screwed them on.
For a pretty and waterproof finish, we finished the chairs with two coats of Sadolin My Garden Woodstain in a colour called Harry's Deckchair. A lovely project. The chairs are heavy and sturdy and are weathering well. They're nearly two years old now and require a good scrub and repaint, more to keep them waterproof than for any other reason as the colour hasn't faded.
I think that each chair cost about twenty pounds when hardware and decoration costs were added. Definitely worth it though as they're also too heavy to steal ;-)
Hannah was a trooper and we have another project lined up for when she returns to visit me in a few weeks. Happy days :-)
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