Natural Wood Bench

When your buying a new house into the middle of the wood ... you end up with lots of wood (log) everywhere ... Maple, oak, Birch ...Thousands of oak acorn were filling the ground ... The idea of building a bench with natural stuff found on my ward came to my head !

Since oak acorn was really easy to find, I've started with that ... But, If there were to old there were kind of rotten ... and if there were too recently on the ground, they were to green ... So I spend and haft of day with my kids in the backward looking for the best oak acorn ! Lots of fun ! I have put them in the oven to make sure they were all dryed. and finally clean them the best I could do .

Next thing I need to get to keep the oak spirit, was to find a big dryed oak log ... Magic, I had one in the shed ...

Chainsaw time ... split it in two pieces !

My goal was to insert oak acorn inside the bench so I had to make a groove. What's best then a heart to remove ... a lot of work ... a lot of fun ! Using chisel, hammer and what ever you need to do so !

To keep it as much as natural, I've decide to put 2 logs for the legs ... Naturally, in oak ! Again, a lot of work to remove the bark ! The tree was almost 100 years old ... It need some respect !

That was not an easy step since everthing was not round and level ... lot's of try an redo ...lots of chisel ... good music ... and you will make it !

What I've done here ... I drilled 4x (1/2'') holes in each groove. And by magic, I had pens that fit perfectly in the middle ... So with that, I was able to ''print'' the pattern on each log portion ... With suprise, it worked pretty well ...

Sometimes, keep it simple and stupid !

I bought Epoxy from ''East cost resin'' ... The only thing left before doing the job was to block each end of the groove so the epoxy wont drip by. I used a silicone sheet and vaseline to make sure epoxy wont stick to it ....

Playing with epoxy is not easy. But my best advise ... you better play with several layers. In my case, I've done about 7 layer to fill the groove till the epoxy was covering the top of the bench also ... with small layers and a heat gun to make the bubble go away ... you will end up with a professional finish.

Some parts of my project were not covered with epoxy ... So I finished them with nothing else then 10 layers of varnish :-! hehe

It need to match with the epoxy coating in a certain way ...

I'm proud of the result ... like in every project, there's always some details that you would like to make better ...

The perfect mind set to start over something new ... but now, with more experience !