Upcycled DIY Potting Bench

See how I took a dumpster find and upcycled it into a French country-style potting bench for my garden.

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 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…

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.

Painting The Table

Start with a 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 paintbrush 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!!