Decorating Gardens, Patios, or Sun Rooms with Unused Furniture

By: R. Renée Bembry

Turning old tables and chairs into flower boxes can be fun and gardeners can make their flower boxes as simple or as complex as they want. Furniture flower boxes can be used in patio rooms and sun-rooms as well as for poolside and entryway displays. Furniture planters can be made from readily available furniture sitting in the garage or shed or furniture picked up at yard sales or thrift stores. Gardeners can even use household furniture they plan to replace anyway. All it takes is a little imagination, a tad of creativity, and maybe a few paint touches here and there to give otherwise unused furniture renewed purposes in life.

Anyone living in a house or apartment type dwelling can make use of furniture flower boxes. You do not need to have a yard. Simply think of furniture flower boxes as décor and decide where you want to put them. Herein lays a few simple ideas of what to do when creating outdoor furniture flower boxes.

Select Furniture to Modify into Flower Boxes

In cases where furniture is stored in garages, or sheds, and especially when owners plan to purchase new furniture to replace older furniture, flower box makers should be absolutely certain they want to use furniture in question for planting and display purposes. Ideas herein call for altering furniture. In addition, altered furniture will be subjected to gardening procedures such as watering, fertilizing, and generally contact with gardening soil.

Choose Flower Pots

After selecting furniture to change into flower boxes, decide what size and shape pot you want to use for the piece of furniture you choose. You may want to choose a plain pot that sets low in the hole you will cut in a chair, for example. You might want to select a more decorative pot that looks prettier beneath the hole or one that will sit closer to the top of the hole where it is more visible to viewers.

Trace a Hole in the Furniture

Once pot selection is made, use the pot as a guide for making a hole in the furniture by setting the pot on the furniture and tracing it with a marker. Before actually tracing the pot, note the pot’s shape and the position you want to sit it in the hole. Use this observation to help with your decision on how big the hole should be. The hole will likely be bigger than the smallest part of the pot in order to get the pot through the hole, yet, smaller than the biggest part of the pot in order to prevent the pot from going all the way through the hole. In the end, the pot must sit snugly in the hole.

Cut out the Hole

Use a jigsaw to cut out the hole tracing. Make cuts as smooth as possible but do not fret too much if cuts go offline a little. Just reposition the jigsaw and set the blade back in position the best you can. After the hole is complete you can choose to sandpaper it, however, this is purely optional – unless you plan to sell the furniture flower box.

Paint Furniture Flower Box

Once the hole is cut and sanded where applicable, makers can paint the furniture flower box if they like. Choosing to paint provides opportunity to decorate with flowers, birds, bees, et cetera. Again, as with sanding, however, painting is optional. If choosing this option, be sure to paint the furniture box in an appropriate ventilated area and wait for paint to dry completely prior to setting pot and plants in hole cutout.

Set Plants in Furniture Box Cutout

Once chair is completely ready for potting, set the furniture in the location where it is to be displayed. Then set the flower pot in the hole, fill the pot with potting soil, and set the plant or plants in the soil. Water the plants and proceed to maintain them as you would any other containerized plants.

Use this basic technique for turning just about any wooden, hard plastic, or vinyl like furniture into flower boxes. Make certain pots have drainage or use two pots for your plant. When using two pots, choose an inside pot that is slightly smaller than the pot measured for the hole. This will allow the outside pot to collect excess water when watering the plants. Outer pot may need emptying now and then depending on how high the roots are above it and how much water is used when watering plants. Inside pot can be elevated using pebbles to help keep settling water away from roots.

Other Tactics

As a substitute for using a flowerpot to hold the plants, flower box makers could use metal fencing material or metal hanging basket bowl to contain layers of peat moss and gardening soil at the undersides of their furniture flower boxes. This method is intended for outdoor displays where containing water is not a factor when watering plants. Fencing will need measuring to determine how much to use. Cut more than enough fencing to cover furniture holes so fencing can be shaped to look like pots sitting beneath furniture box holes.

To use fencing material or hanging basket, set the fencing or basket by stapling or u-hooking it to the underside of the cutout furniture hole. Nailing can suffice as a u-hook when nails used as u-hooks are long enough to push into the furniture at the pointed end and then hammered in a manner that bends the nails flat at their mid-sections. Each flattened nail should cover a strip of fencing metal it will support. The nail heads should then be hammered into the furniture similar to the way the points were nailed.

Use these furniture flower basket ideas as guides for creating any type of furniture as mentioned above. Another good idea is to add a few multi-sized holes to unwanted tables, and place varying sized pots in the holes with a variety of different types of plants.