Reuse Recycle: Old Wood, New Seat | Winter Jobs | The Blackberry Garden

Hello, I have another blog post showing you another Winter job I completed recently. More snow has hit in the past few days, so it does not look like I will be venturing out into the garden for any length of time at least for the next week. I will be firmly sat indoors with a cup of tea planning the garden or sheltering in the greenhouse! Anyway, I suppose there is nothing I can do but wait, so on with the post…

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Today I thought I would show you a new seat I have created for The Blackberry Garden made out of recycled wood from our garden shed. I have laid out this post in chronological order to show you how this area has developed over the past year and a half. If you don’t want to read all of that, you can skip to the bottom to see the finished product.

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Sep 2016:

When we moved into our home in June 2016, we had one of the supporting walls removed and an a new beam put in its place. I asked our builders at the time to save the bricks and put them in a pile for us in the garden for us to build a wall. There were some comical looks exchanged, but they did as requested, heh. So then Mr Meadow set to work on the first stage in this area and build the curved raised brick planter:

The Blackberry Garden, September 2016

The Blackberry Garden, September 2016

Here you can see how chaotic this area used to look and how much it has developed since then (viewed from an upstairs window). Our old shed was impossible to access due to the amount of clutter that had been left inside it for years. The door lock had to be broken just to get inside!

The Blackberry Garden, September 2016

From September, we pretty much left this area alone in terms of structural work. The grass was tended to occasionally and I planted into the raised bed, but we worked mostly on other areas of the garden and erected the greenhouse.

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May 2017:

Then in May I erected the trellis support in this area that provides both privacy and support for plants for the Blackberry Garden. At the time, it looked rather Frankenstein-esk and strange, but we knew the long term plan.

The Blackberry Garden, May 2017

The Blackberry Garden, May 2017

You may also notice that Frankenstein was created before the deck had been installed in this area too. Later on last year that was completed and Mr Meadow installed the beginnings of a seat to define the area:

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Just for fun, here is this area in the first flush of snow recently too:

The Blackberry Garden, February 2018

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March 2018:

So now, fast forward to this month and I decided to construct the back of the seat and finish it off as much as possible. In the spirit of recycling what we’ve already got as I did recently in this blog post, I created the seat from left over wood we have accumulated from renovating inside our home, from clearing out the garden and also leftovers from various projects.

The Blackberry Garden, March 2018

The only items I purchased for this job were two coated outdoor metal plates (about £1 each) for adding additional support for the slanted back support. I decided to do this because I used the design and construction from our arbour seat in the Rose Garden as inspiration and guidance. Suffice to say, it is very solid and it’s going anywhere even in these harsh winds we’ve been experiencing!

Here is the back view of the seat which I finished off with old slats from an old fence panel:

The Blackberry Garden, March 2018

As you can see, I ran out of white paint to finish the job, so we will have to pick up another tin at some point as we have other pieces of hard landscaping to refresh this year once the weather warms up again. I am glad to have got this job done; this seating area is the view you see from our kitchen window so it makes a difference looking neater and somewhat nearer to completion. I hope you enjoyed seeing how this area has developed. Now, if only this cold weather and snow could move along we might all be able to get on with Spring!

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Written by Bethany Wright at The English Meadow