~ Potting Bench ~ Garden Shed ~ Create & Recycle

A little revisit to the Potting Bench area:

I love updates to see how things are progressing in the garden. In this case, there are no new pictures. Since my Sweet Hubby is home now, he seems to think that a potting area should be used for messy outdoor garden stuff! So while I am off in another part of the yard, this area has gone to pot. But I am keeping an eye on it all, hoping to have enough energy to get back to this side again, soon. Bet it happens to you as well. Get one thing done, and you turn around and whatever you finished a few months ago needs tending again. Enjoy this little revisit to the Potting Shed.

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Outdoor furniture! That's what wood shelves and other building elements are when they become a space to pot your plants and other gardening activities as well as areas to sit and relax. After all you have shelves and pots and spoons inside, these are just outside. Whatever you would like to call it, a potting
shed, potting bench, garden shed, it shares a lot with the inside the house.

We  use this space every day. And you see a peek at another post about how to plant a succulent dish/bowl garden.

After Sweet Husband built a wood top for an iron base that I wanted to use for a desk, it accidently was  outside for day and it got rained on. The boards warped. I had taken time to select really nice wood and he took the time to build it very strong. So I needed something else to do with a wood top which took a lot of work and more than a few pennies. It just seemed like a good time to start the potting bench I had been wanting!

Much of the structure is made of new pressure treated wood, but it was the perfect time to rummage through the shed and see what goodies could be recycled in a new fun way. The molding and the half round piece were once used in the house. A few of these which are not pressure treated will be replaced later on as the weather may take a toll on it.

But for now, they are being reused outside. This is pretty much they way they looked when I found them after they had been hiding away for some time,  except I  painted white over it and removed the paint with a rage a few times to make the molding look older.

The white fence serves as a back wall, but we also added some leftover lattice so I could hang tools or whatever as needed. It's pretty and now being used instead of lying around.

The brackets look old, but they are new.  They started out kind of a brown rusty color, I painted them with Annie Sloan chalk paint Old White, then dry brushed with a flat exterior true white. This gave them a nice antiqued white finish.

The plaster corbels were once used inside, now they are another great element to help with the look of an older garden room. They had been painted previously as you see them, and I left them as is so they could just continue to look worn.

There were three of the corbels, so they are on each end in the center of the shelf.

When old meets new it is the perfect juxtaposition of elements. While the large handled tub is new, the wooden box is old. Not sure just how old, but I've had it for about 30 years using it for everything you  can think of for storage.  It was already old and very used looking when I got. Although I have no idea now where it came from.

Again some old and some newer. That pretty planter has been in and out of the house and garden for the last 10 years. The pot with the floral mark and the golden strawberry type pot in the back are both hand thrown pottery pieces which  came from art shows again at least 30 years ago.

Several years ago I wrote online about how if you painted something with copper paint, it would develop a patina like real copper over time, because is has copper in the paint. This large bowl was painted back then, and used inside. For the last few years it has been on the porch and it now has some lovely colors. Now it is used to make soil mixes for the new plants.

The size of the table top is the perfect amount of space for starting new plants or transplanting into a larger container.

I was on the hunt for a large galvanized tub and found this one nicely dinged up at Home Depot. The only one they had so I asked if I could have it for $5 and the HD lady said sure, and home with me it came. Potting soil is kept here for quick access.

The morning starts out shady here, then gets a good amount of sun before getting shade again later in the day. So you will usually see me out here in the summer either early or late.

We can have hurricane weather in this area so everything has to be structural sound if it is going stay put if very strong winds come through. The posts are actually in the ground, and everything was built from there. This roof was replaced with metal roofing after a few years so it matched a garden room nearby. 

I hope you enjoyed seeing a little building outside.