By Danielle Peterson

While preparing her yard for spring, Mary Ann Varey decided her garden needed a new addition, and a bench would be just the thing.

Mary Ann used barn board to create the main chair and the back support of the bench. The arms and legs were made from oak tree branches she found in her backyard. “I used live branches that were about 2-1/2 inches in diameter,” she says. Mary Ann used a chop saw to cut the branches to size and then drilled a pilot hole so the wood wouldn’t split when she screwed together the legs and braces.

To personalize the bench, she used a jigsaw to cut the back support to look like birdhouses. Smaller branches from a birch tree were used to create the roof lines. To make the roof, she cut the branches down the center with a table saw and then cut them to size. After tacking them on with finishing nails, Mary Ann used carpenter’s glue to reinforce some of the peeling bark.
 
Once all of the pieces were screwed together, Mary Ann coated the bench with a sealer to prevent water damage.
Not only does it look great, the bench didn’t take long to make. “This bench took only a couple of evenings to complete,” Mary Ann says.

To see a close-up of the bench, click here.

Check out some of our outdoor projects here!