About two weeks ago now I was tasked with the construction
of four raised flower beds for a back garden. I have no real experience building
these kinds of things, but with some help from friends and books I successfully
built them. The process requires some planning and the right tools, but is
easily do-able by anyone, so I thought I’d write my building process for one of the beds up as a blog
post to anyone who’d like to learn. Good luck with the construction!
Parts:
The first thing I did was find out what materials I had to
build the raised beds with. There was a cedar wood pallet left over from
bringing in materials from a job earlier this summer with good quality, not
rotting wood. I took the pallet apart with a crowbar, leaving me with 14 long
pieces (2.5m long, 7.5cm wide and 2cm deep) and 5 short pieces (1.2m long, 9cm
wide and 3.5cm deep). As the flower bed
I was building was going to be relatively small, this was all the wood that I
needed.
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Getting the pieces of wood ready to go |
Planning:
The flower bed was going to be positioned on a raised
decking area, in a space 1.7m wide between two steps to different doors, and could
also be no more than half a metre tall or away from the wall, as it would get
in the way of people walking.
This part of the
construction process is unfortunately quite difficult to explain using a blog,
but you have to try and design the flower bed in a way to optimize both how
good it looks where it’s positioned, and also to optimize the usage of
materials available to you. This optimizing of materials is a very important
part, as it will allow you to save money by limiting the amount of waste or
additional material that needs to be bought. In this example, I settled on the
following design:
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Side on view of the bed with my plan for the size of the walls. |
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Top down view of the bed, the green rectangles are the legs that hold the structure together and raise the bed off the ground. |
The majority of the planning I did when I was actually
designing the bed was through sketching in a simple school-esque exercise book
with a pencil. Although my drawing skills are worse than a new born baby, sketches
are still an incredibly powerful tool. They let your mind really work through
the problem, and gives you a solid blueprint in place to work off.
This would require the following materials to be cut:
- 12 x 1m cut from the long boards, 8 for the long sides and 4 for the base
- 8 x 37.5cm cut from the long boards, 4 for each short side
- 4 x 42.5cm cut from the short boards, for the legs of the flower bed
Using these measurements allowed me to cut 2 x 1m and 1 x
37.5cm out of each long board, helping to minimise any wasted materials. The
legs of the flower bed will be positioned at each of the 4 for corners of the
bed, and will create the basic structure for the side boards to attach to, and
will also raise the bed off the floor.
Preparation:
Most of being prepared to start the job is about having the
materials and tools you need ready for the job. The main equipment I will use are split into 2 sections, the tools I need to cut the wood planks, and the tools I need to put the flower bed together.
Tools to cut and shape the wood into the required shapes:
- A rip saw to cut up the wood (although a hand saw works perfectly fine too at home)
- Tape measure to measure out the pieces
- Pencil to mark the wood for cutting
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Rip saw set up and ready to go! |
Tools I need to put the flower bed together:
- A drill to screw the boards together (I used a Black & Decker impact driver)
- Screws, both long (about 6 - 8 cm long) and short (about 3 - 5cm long)
- I also used a smaller drill to pre-drill the holes so the screws would go in easier and were less likely to split of damage the wood.
Although this doesn't seem like much, these simple bits and pieces are all that’s
required to put the bed together.
Using the rip saw to cut up the wood pieces:
To anyone who isn't familiar with a rip saw, it’s basically
a chainsaw attached to a moving arm that can be brought down to cut narrow
pieces of wood. The main use of it in this project was to cut the pieces of
wood to size. Mostly due to the loud noise, the rip saw can be a daunting tool
to use, but with a bit of practise you’ll get the hang of it in no time. Here
are some of my helpful tips to using the rip saw.
- The first thing to do is make sure that the rip saw is set up in a secure area. I placed mine on the floor, and buried it a bit in the gravel, to ensure it wasn't moving anywhere.
- The second step is to cut the wood. Measure out one board to cut, and then use this board as the template for all of the other boards. Then, even if this first board is out by a few cm, all the other boards will be of a similar length so everything is still fine.
- When you line up the cutting mark on the board to the rip saw, line it up with the rip saw switched off. This may seem obvious, but it’s often easy to get carried away with how quick the sawing is going, and slip while lining it up and put a finger through the saw.
- Cut through the wood slowly. Although it might be tempting to just wiz the saw straight through the plank of wood, doing it too quickly may result in the board splitting apart and breaking. The key thing is to take your time while cutting through the wood.
- Once the piece of wood has been but through, keep the saw on when you lift it up from the wood, to prevent the wood getting stuck to the rip saw on the way out.
With these simple steps it’s very easy to cut through the
wood needed for the flower bed.
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Getting the wood ready to be chopped up
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The wood ready to be put together into a flower bed |
You should now have all of your materials ready and waiting
to turn into your own raised flower bed. In my next blog, I’ll go through the
stages of actually piecing your flower bed together.