The planter project

Last month, when I told you about our new patio set, I mentioned that we'd been able to haul it home because we'd already rented a truck to tote lumber for the laundry room and for another project that I promised to tell you about later. Well, that time has come. Allow me to present our new outdoor planter.

The background on this: When we moved into our house, there were several barriers between our property and our next-door neighbor's. Our driveway was lined with a couple of hefty concrete road barriers, and our neighbor had some large evergreen bushes and an aging picket fence along the side of his yard. The bushes covered up the gaps in the picket fence and softened the industrial forms of the crumbling concrete barriers, so taken as a whole it didn't look too bad. But a few years ago, our neighbor cut down those shrubs, and their absence exposed the full extent of the fence's battered condition—not to mention the ugliness of the concrete barriers on our side.

So, around that time, Brian started noodling with ideas for ways to replace those concrete blocks with something more attractive that would also be tall enough to conceal the fence. He considered putting up a new fence, then toyed with the idea of planter boxes with attached trellises for climbing vines. But eventually he settled on the idea of a couple of plain, trellis-free planter boxes that he could build out of two-by-fours. He spent several months sketching out different designs until he settled on one he was satisfied with: a long, deep V shape formed by stacked two-by-fours mounted on three sets of crossed legs. Then, after hauling home the lumber, he spent much of the past two weekends sawing all the boards to the proper length and assembling the pieces that could be assembled indoors. And finally, today, he had a few free hours with decent weather to put it all together.

Mind you, when I say "decent," I don't mean "pleasant." As of 10 am, the thunderstorms that the weather forecast has been consistently and inaccurately predicting all week still had not materialized. But in their place we had blazing sun, heavy humidity, and temperatures that were already into the upper eighties. When I wasn't helping Brian with the parts of the job that required an extra pair of hands, I was bringing him cold drinks and dishes of salty pickles and cherry tomatoes to keep his electrolyte balance up. And even with all that, he didn't attempt to assemble more than one of the two planters he had planned. But that's enough to show you how it was done.

He started by lining up all the cut pieces in the driveway, like this:

Then he attached the leg pieces together and connected them with long two-by-fours that would form the tops of the the planter's two sides, like this:

Then he unfolded it again and started attaching additional two-by fours to  complete the sides. Once they were all in place, the frame was much heavier, so we had to work together to fold the two sides into place. To hold them that way while he worked on attaching the end pieces, Brian applied a couple of clamps and pushed the legs into a set of little foot brackets he'd made for them. (Later, he plans to remove the end pieces and turn these into the feet of the second planter.)

He ran into a slight complication when he tried to insert the bottom piece. According to his design, there should have been just enough room to slide one intact two-by four into the V of the crossed legs. But since the boards he was using weren't perfect (some wider than others, some slightly warped), there wasn't. So, rather than try to shave down the side of one of the two-by-fours, he simply slid it in with its shorter edge facing up. That left a bit of a gap in the bottom, but since we're filling up the bottom with rocks for drainage anyway (or, to be more accurate, chunks of the old concrete barriers), it shouldn't matter.

I helped hold the end pieces while he drilled the pilot holes and screwed them into place. Then, working together, we flipped the now very heavy planter upside down so Brian could attach the feet. And finally, we got it back upright and maneuvered it into the spot where he wanted it. That was when he discovered one final complication: since our driveway is neither level nor flat, one end of the planter was floating nearly an inch off the ground. He had to shim it up with a couple of the boards stripped from of our old patio set. Some additional, smaller shims were needed to stabilize the planter from side to side.

This project took up the entire morning and about an hour of the afternoon, but we managed to get it done before the long-promised thunderstorms finally hit. Of course, "done" doesn't mean completely done, because we still have to assemble the whole second planter and fill them both up with dirt and plants. (I've been doing some research on suitable perennials to keep in an outdoor container year-round, but we haven't made any firm decisions yet.) But already, even this single planter sitting there empty looks much better than the dilapidated fence behind it.