Planters

I wanted to do a lot of container gardening in my backyard so we decided to build a whole bunch of planters  to grow the veggies in. We got a lot of reclaimed wood from my husbands workplace to make them out of. Mostly crates and a few pallets. Crates are much easier to work with and take apart than pallets are.

It was a lot of work to disassemble them all.

We decided to invest in a planer since we plan on using a lot of reclaimed wood for many projects around the house.

It just gets the wood all to the same thickness and a nice smooth surface to start a project with.

Once the wood was planed it was all cut to size for the vertical planks for the planters.

Then they were all stained.

They were then all lined up and screwed to a frame from the inside so all the screws wouldn't be visible from the outside

We made the mistake with the first planter of not really thinking about how we were going to join all the sides together. On the other planters we inset the frame 3/4 inch so the panels would join up overlapping the frame so you couldn't see it. The first planter we made the length from the stairs to the outer edge of the deck. Its huge.

We just used full length boards for the back sides of the planters since no one would ever see it. Much easier and faster than all the short planks.

Here's the first planter completed and filled with dirt. We have the slight problem than our whole backyard is on a slight incline. We didn't account for that with the first planter so there was a lot of digging down into the dirt to level it out.

On the second planter that went up against the garage we took that into account and made the back panel shorter than the front panel and put a slant on the bottom of the side panels.

So far we've got four built and one left to go off the left end of the deck. Grass is coming today so it'll finally start looking nearly complete.

For this project the wood was all free. The only cost was the screws and the stain.

Deck Addition

We decided to add a small addition onto the deck for the BBQ to sit on. We made it 4 feet by 2 1/2 feet. We put the frame together before attaching it to the deck.

We put down pavers to support the leg posts.

Once we attached it to the deck we measured the legs and cut them to size.

Once the legs were attached we cut the planks to size and screwed them down.

It was a quick and easy project, it only took a couple of hours to complete. Now the BBQ isn't blocking the path out the back door.

Backyard

My dad came by today and trenched out a line for us to run more electricity out to the garage.

Got a surprise load of dirt delivered today as well.

We are having topsoil put down in the backyard tomorrow. Once the final grade passes inspection well have grass too. Hopefully within the next two weeks. In the meantime were going to get raised planters built for the backyard. We've got part of one together we just have to plain more wood to complete it. The yard is finally cleared of all our reclaimed wood except now its filling the garage. It'll hopefully all get used in the building of the planters and then maybe I can actually park in the garage.