Fence Board Potting Bench

4 Materials
$40
5 Hours
Easy
Check out how I transformed a hole in my house (you read that right) into a cute little potting bench! The previous owners of our home had a dog door in the basement. I'm not a fan (when you live where the snow blows sideways at 65 miles an hour, you don't really want a hole in your house), so it went away. We patched the drywall on the inside and I sealed in the hole from the outside, but I had a dilemma. I could not, for the life of me, find siding to match the existing siding. I looked everywhere in a 60 mile radius to no avail. So when my husband said he was going to buy some fence boards to build a wind break for our bees (because of the aforementioned wind), I asked him to buy a few more for me. Read on to see how I used some fence boards and repurposed flooring to cover a hole and create a functional space to keep all my little gardening supplies.
First, I had my husband pick up five extra 6 ft. fence boards for me and I painted them plain white with exterior paint. It took three coats to get good coverage. I really love all those old door potting benches I see online, but they're so popular that it's getting really hard to find cool old doors anymore, so I decided to go with fence boards instead (because: cheap, easy to find).
I picked up two pre-made table legs along with their corresponding attachment brackets. I bought two decorative shelf brackets for my top shelf as well.
I also picked up a hanging basket so I could keep gardening supplies out of the rain underneath my shelf.
Assembling it was simple. I attached the five boards to the exterior wall with screws. For the bottom shelf, I cut a piece of plywood to the length of the fence boards, and made it 12 inches wide. For the top shelf, I used three pieces of wood flooring that I glued together and painted blue. I painted the table legs blue as well. I attached them to the underside of the bottom shelf using the corresponding brackets. I attached a piece of wood to the fence boards (see previous picture) at the same height as the table legs and screwed the plywood shelf onto it. Then I tiled the bottom shelf using some leftover flooring I had laying around. I painted some trim pieces blue and attached them around the tile. I attached my top shelf to my store-bought brackets and hung it up, then I hung up a basket underneath. That's all she wrote. It only took me a day including paint drying time to make this. You could literally use any material to make the shelves, I just went with what I had on hand that I could repurpose, mostly wood flooring materials and tile. I love my little potting bench! It's so useful to have a place to keep all my gardening things right where I need them and it's also a useful place to re-pot my indoor plants (I guess it lives up to its name)!
Suggested materials:
  • 6 ft fence boards   (Home Depot)
  • Decorative shelf brackets   (Home Depot)
  • Hanging wire basket   (Target)
See all materials
Kati Urbanek-Countryesque
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