0
0
Getting your garden ready for the warmer months is not only about planting. We take a look at how to furnish your outdoor space for less.
Work with what you have
Old wooden tables and chairs that look as if they are on their last legs can be restored until they are good as new (or at least charmingly worn) with a bit of effort.
The carpenter Ian Varley of Rustic Carpentry says: “If you’ve got some old furniture that’s looking a bit raggedy, make sure it is completely dry and give it a sand down on a dry day. Then paint with a 50/50 mix of turpentine and linseed oil.” The mixture will offer some protection from the elements as well as improving the way it looks.
Old plastic furniture sets can also be brought back from the brink. If giving it a wash with detergent and a sponge is not enough to remove mould and algae, which can build up over time, add some white vinegar.
Photograph: Aleksei Koldunov/Alamy
Or, for a quick fix, spray with WD-40 or similar and rub clean with a dry cloth.
Treasures at the tip
“I made a fire pit out of the metal drum inside a tumble dryer sourced from the local tidy tip,” says Jane Perrone, a gardening expert and the host of the On the Ledge podcast.
She adds that if you have some DIY skills, you could add a wooden top to that sort of item to create a side table.
Intact household furniture found at the tip or in a charity shop can be weatherproofed and turned into outdoor furniture. “You can upcycle an old wooden dresser into a potting bench or tool store,” Perrone says.
Sand the item and treat as suggested previously, use a ready-made wood preservative, or revive with outdoor paints to add some colour.
Sean Tolram, who trained at the London School of Furniture Making, says the job will be easier with an orbital sander rather than hand sanding. As for protection from the elements and the finish, he says: “I like to use a stain rather than varnish, as the effect tends to last longer.” He recommends Taylor Brown wood preservative oil and Osmo exterior paint for wood.
Think laterally
Virtually anything container-shaped can be repurposed into a planter, often with minimal effort. Drill holes for drainage and off you go.
Vikkie Lee, who demonstrates a huge array of DIY projects on her YouTube channel the Carpenter’s Daughter, has old baths as planters and is successfully growing veg in them, while Perrone says: “Galvanised dustbins make amazing massive planters.”
For small wooden planters, take the drawers from a scrapped chest of drawers and add blocks of wood to form legs. If you are after a larger wooden raised bed, try pallet collars. These are used between wooden pallets to protect goods in transit and are shaped very much like the raised beds that you can buy from garden centres but cost a fraction of the price and can be procured for free if you are lucky. You can add wooden blocks as feet to raise them off the ground and line them with hessian sacks to prevent soil falling through, or stack them on top of one another to make a deeper planter.
Unwanted building materials and industrial equipment can also be reused.
“If you can find wooden cable reels, they make brilliant tables and chairs,” Lee says. Get in touch with local manufacturers to see if they have old pieces to give away or sell for not much money. “I made a table from a large reel and used blocks of wood to get rid of any wobble,” she says. “Then I found smaller reels which made seats. Add hairpin legs, or get any kind of legs from Ikea, and make them the way you like them.” She painted the whole lot with wood preserver (Lee used Ronseal), let it dry thoroughly, and had a whole new outdoor dining set for next to nothing.
Get creative with pallets
“Pallets are ready-made bits of funky furniture,” Varley says. “A lovely project, which is really simple, is to take four pallets and make them into either a table or a seat. Just stack three pallets on top of one another. Then dismantle the fourth one and nail planks to fill the gaps in the top pallet so that you have a solid top surface. Sand the wood back lightly and treat with the turps and linseed mixture, or paint it any colour you like. Use it as a table or add cushions for a seat.”
For more complicated projects (of which there are many to be found online), you may need to take the pallet to pieces. “It can take at least an hour to dismantle a pallet,” says Tolram, who recommends investing in a pallet breaker tool to make the job easier, while Varley says a lump hammer and a crowbar will also do the trick.
Source materials for free (or almost free)
Tolram makes furniture out of all kinds of reclaimed materials and says he has never paid for a pallet – instead, he asks at garden centres and looks out for them outside houses where people have been receiving deliveries for renovations.
“My personal rule is that if it’s on the street, it’s fair game,” he says. “If it’s in a skip or in someone’s garden, I will usually knock on the door to ask if it’s OK for me to take it off their hands.”
Varley, who lives in rural Leicestershire, asks farms or small local businesses if they have pallets that are taking up space.
It’s not always straightforward to get free pallets – they do have a cost, and companies can sell them off to be reused. But while the pallet manufacturers and reconditioners who sell them often impose a large minimum order (you probably don’t need hundreds of pallets), some sell small quantities to private individuals to collect from the depot.
At the time of writing, Associated Pallets in Southampton was selling basic pallets for £7.95 each, and pallet collars from £6.45 each, while you could pick up pallets for £1.95 upwards from Universal Pallets in Manchester.
While harmful chemicals should no longer be used to treat the wood in pallets, there are still some chemically treated pallets in circulation. A spokesperson for PalletOnline (which is involved in the distribution of pallets but doesn’t sell them), says: “Pallets should have a stamp to show how they have been treated. Most are heat-treated or kiln-dried to kill bacteria and fungus but some might have been chemically treated with sulfuryl fluoride or even methyl bromide.”
Never take pallets with MB or SF stamps, and avoid salvaging bits of damaged pallet wood that have no visible stamps – you can’t be certain that chemicals were not used in treatment.
