Old Park Bench

Old bench. My parent's neighbor gave it to them when he moved.

The hubs and I also got 2 more for ourselves, but we haven't done anything with them yet!

Depending on how bad off your bench is, this can be an easy or hard fix.

First, take the bench apart remembering to label the wood pieces.

If your bench is well rusted - try using WD40 and a wire brush to clean up the hardware.

This bench was easy to get apart. Our other two? Not so much.

Since this bench wasn't in too bad of shape, we just took the metal pieces outside and cleaned them with WD40. WD40 works great on cleaning rust!

After they were clean, we gave each piece two coats of clear spray lacquer.

Our other benches will need a coat of spray paint. I am thinking of going with the rust prevention kind.

Then we sanded. A LOT.

(Remember your labels! We had them in pencil, so we were constantly re-writing them.)

And, to our amazement, the gray wood was still okay underneath.

If yours isn't, you have two options. Paint, or replace the wood.

Painting is the cheapest, but replacing the wood may be necessary if your wood is too rotten.

This being the case, this project may not even be economical depending on your attachment to your particular bench! It just depends.

We chose to stain this bench.

The dry wood sucked up the stain...

So, after several coats we lacquered the heck out of these too!

Here it is all done! This is at my parent's house a few weeks later.

It had gotten a bit dirty in its time outside.

I am thinking of taking over a can of lacquer this weekend and re-lacquering it for extra durability.

Plus, this was one of my first projects this summer and I am much better with a spray-paint can now!