Raised Flower Bed Construction Part 2: Piecing it together and Painting

About 3 weeks ago now I posted up the first part of two blog posts describing how to build a raised flower bed. In the first part I covered getting the materials you need and putting the planning in place to be ready to start building and in this part I will cover actually building the bed and then painting it.

Piecing it together:

After going through the first blog post, you should now have all the materials and a plan to build the flower bed. As a reminder, these are the materials that I have ready to start building with, along with where in the bed they will go:

• 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 longboards, 4 for each short side
• 4 x 42.5cm cut from the short boards, for the legs of the flower bed.

The next step is to get the tools ready that will be needed for building the flower bed, and are relatively simple tools to get a hold of:

• 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 are less likely to split of damage the wood.

Now we’re finally ready to start the actual building! Although all the getting prepared does take a while, it’s absolutely necessary to ensure the building process goes well and gives you the best looking flower bed at the end. I decided to write this part of the blog as a sort of list/set of instructions to help you follow the process I went through as I built the bed.

1. The first thing to build is the two longer side walls for the bed. These were made out of four 1m boards and two 42.5cm boards each. The 42.5cm boards are the legs for the bed, and are used as the supports to screw the four 1m boards together, as shown below. I used two screws to screw each side board onto the leg board, the positions of which are shown as the black dots on the diagram.

    

   The side panel for the flower bed.

   A small gap is left between the top of the leg board and the top of the side board, as this allows the top of the leg to be covered in soil and so make the bed look nicer. When doing this ensure that the gaps are the same height, as this will mean that all the legs will be the same height.
2. Once the long side walls are made, it’s now time to connect them together. This is done using the 8 x 37.5cm boards, with 4 used at each end. As these boards are the same height as the boards used on the two longer sides and so care should be taken while building to ensure all the boards line up around the outside. You should now be left with what looks like a flower bed, minus a bottom part.

   

   Attaching the end panels to the long side panels.

3. The last step in the construction process is to attach the bottom panels. For my flowerbed, the bottom panels needed a small corner taken out to allow them to fit around the legs of the bed. The panels were first attached by screwing them to the side panels. This isn’t a very study method to join them, so I built a support rail that fitted to the bottom of the inside of the flower bed and attached to the side panels and bottom panels to give a more secure fit. With this, the flower bed construction is complete! Only one step remaining now…

Painting:

Painting the flowerbed is often ignored by people as unimportant, but sealing the wood to prevent it from rotting is key to the longevity of the bed. For mine, I used Hazel brown Ronseal woodland colours paint. This is a one coat paint, and painted on very easily with a simple brush to give a nice medium brown colour. After giving the bed time to dry, I moved it to its final position in the garden, ready to have some lovely daisies and lavender planted in it.

Painting the beds to protect them from rot.

Bed in its final position with the first daisies planted in.