Trash to Treasure - Bed to Bench

I've been really into trash to treasure lately, I suppose this winter it will calm down a bit when I can't get outside for ohhh.... 6 months! sigh.

I've had this idea for a while, I've seen someone else do it and wanted to give it a shot. It's taking an old bed frame and creating a bench out of it! It's easier than it sounds, and it only takes a couple simple tools to do it.

#1. Start by finding a bed frame that's seen better days. Mine was found at a town wide garage sale for $1.00. It's a twin size, not too big, and full of potential!

#2. Next step was obvious. It had to be cleaned!! I didn't care if it was going to get wet (no pledge here) as the finish was bad, and I was going to be painting it anyway, so I just hosed it off.

#3. Primer is your friend! Don't bother these old pieces unless you use some good primer or you'll be painting over and over again.

#4. What color!??
So exciting.

#5. Spring green! Yay!! It's so springy... and.. uh... green-y.

Oh wait...
It looks like crap painted on, it really looks more like neon yellow. Blech....

#6. So I ended up with turquoise blue, which is my new go to color. Sadly I couldn't find a can of this that I loved, so I had to *mix my own*. Oh yes I did. Not only did I do it, I did it twice because I didn't have enough, and it was so close you couldn't even see my brush strokes.

Go me.

So in this step I needed to cut my foot board in half to make the side rails. First I cut it exactly in half, but realized the seat would be too deep so I re-cut it so that the sides were 19" deep. I used a simple jigsaw to cut these lines.

#7. I then screwed the sides to the ends of the headboard. It's starting to look like a bench! I ended up cutting a little bit off of the foot board sides to make them a little lower to rest your arm on. I did this with my miter saw. Ignore the dirt, at this point it's been outside for a while. LOL.

Forgive me, July was 100 deg like ... every. single. day.

#8. I then cut rails for the seat sit on. I screwed this part in from the ends. Be sure to do all of this on a flat surface. It's hard to get it nice and square out in your yard ;)

#9. Using my miter saw again, I cut a whole bunch of slats to fit across the seat. Normally I might pick something different (a solid piece or 2 long boards, etc) but I already owned this wood - so it was FREE.

#10. I had to carefully cut around the shape of the bed to make the end slats fit perfectly. I then used my palm sander (you could use just sandpaper if you wish) to sand the cut edges of the boards to keep people from getting splinters. I then just painted the sides of the boards as I figured it would go quicker that way. (it did)

#11. Shoo bee!!

All the slats are then carefully spaced (I used a nail as a spacer) and screwed from above into the cross rails. It probably would have looked better if I would have been fancier and screwed from below, but it really wasn't THAT big of a deal for me.

#12. After all the slats are down, I then painted all the flat surfaces of the seat, but it's been a long summer (this took me 3 months here and there.... no really). The blue parts went through the hail storm so it took a tiny bit of a beating. Ok, a big bit of a beating so I had some touch ups to do. I also realized I needed to reinforce some of my joints on the original bed with some super long screws!

I also needed to fill in all the screw holes. At first I wasn't going to sweat it, but there ended up being quite a few and I didn't like it, so I had to fill them!

TA DA!!
I added a few handmade pillows and it's done! I think it's really adorable how it turned out, and I believe it will end up in our antique booth. Hmm... think I can talk Gene into letting me keep it?

I also found another bed frame at a garage sale for FREE.. only it's fancier. oh la la. lol (Although, I might save it for when I get my studio though for boudoir shoots). I'm sure you'll see that one someday too.

BTW, bench for sale - chicken not included.