Upcycled DIY Potting Bench

This year I expanded my vegetable garden space to make room for a flower cutting garden. You can see my garden expansion HERE. I spent the Winter looking at pretty pictures of English and French cottage gardens, and I have an idea in my head of what I hope mine will look like this Summer!

One thing I fell in love with was the idea of a romantic-looking potting bench in the garden…now to find something I could transform. We live near a big university and the students were moving out for the year; my husband told me he had driven by a big apartment building and there was a huge dumpster filled with all kinds of furniture….start the car, let’s go!!

From the street I spied a white vanity sitting next to a dumpster…it turned out to be a perfect size and in amazing condition!! My husband was just psyched that my dumpster diving expedition was over in 2 minutes. Let me show you how I upcycled a dumpster vanity into an upcycled DIY potting bench…

Upcycled DIY Potting Bench

It was a perfect weekend to work on a project…we had so much rain so the table full of plants in the background had to wait a few more days until I could plant them. I removed the mirror from the vanity and cleaned down the soon-to-be potting table to remove all the dirt.

Base Coat

My first step was to give the entire table a coat of light turquoise paint. Wow, what a difference a little paint made!!

The bright color really brought out all the pretty details of the table! I let the paint dry completely before the next step.

Highlight The Details

My favorite way to highlight the details of a furniture piece I’m working on is to dry brush different colors over the base color.

Dry brushing is a technique where you lightly dip the end of a straight paint brush into your paint, then dab/tap off most of the paint (I use a paper towel to dab off the excess paint) before lightly passing your paintbrush over your piece.

This helps any details really pop and make them stand out.

Look how a little bit of Griege paint brought out all the details!

I let the greige paint dry before doing the same dry brushing technique using a terra cotta shade that gave an earthy tone over the entire potting bench table.

Look how the turquoise and terra cotta play off of each other…isn’t it so pretty!!

Since I’m using this outside as a potting bench, my final step was to brush on a satin polyacrylic to protect it.

Let’s Head To The Garden!

Once the polyacrylic top coat was dry it was time to move it into my garden and see if my cottage dreams would come true!!!

I think they definitely did!!!

It was a perfect morning to test out my DIY potting bench! Some of my fragrant lilacs are blooming and I needed to bring in an armful to enjoy.

…and my pot of pansies is still going strong!!

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