Build a 4x8 Raised Garden Bed for $50! This Hack Makes it Stronger With No Wood (almost)

Hey guys, welcome back to today's show. I want to

build

a planter that measures four feet by eight feet by two feet deep and I can confirm, having just returned from the lumber yard, that lumber prices are crazy, two by fours they used to be. They're under two dollars and now they're closer to nine dollars, so I wanted to

build

this

garden

box with as little

wood

as possible and what I did here was let me show you what I have in the truck, first of all. I'm sure you've seen it before. A mini planter is built.

It only has a corrugated roof. This material is cheap. This material costs about 15 per sheet for a two foot by eight foot section, so that's what the sides of the box will be. made of and then I also got a little bit of

this

drip rail and then I'll explain how I'm going to use this. I have three sheets of that, excuse me, three strips of that, I'll use it, but I also want to say. I'm going to need some

wood

for this. I tried to figure out if there was a way to do this without using wood at all and the problem, I mean, of course there is, but really wasn't it going to be a save to somehow save this old cypress from the girls' play set from back in the day? years has turned out to be a very wise decision even though it has been difficult to store it now if you don't get it down there if you don't have a couple of cypress trees.

Those 4x4s hanging around your house don't worry because I'm going to use such a small amount of wood in this project that I guarantee you'll be able to find the wood you'll need even if you have to use pallet wood or lumber. Behind someone's shed, someone will have the small amount of wood you need for this

garden

planter. Okay, let's go. Oh, I was going to try to do this mostly outside. It's actually a pretty nice day, but the sands are horrible, so. I'm going to try to do one part on the inside and another on the outside.

The first thing I want to do is verify that they are actually 24 inches and they are not, in fact they are 26 and 3 16 tall, so look I got more for my money. Than I expected, the four by fours will go to the corners of the bed to provide structural support. I need to mark the 26 and the 3 16 here and then you can cut them out with the circular saw if you want. I could cut it with a circular saw I could cut it with a hand saw I really don't want to put in a lot of dust I just said I'm going to have them in a minute but I was about to don't want to? put a lot of dust in the tent so I'm just going to judo cut them okay hey okay first cut bring it down I'm actually going to use this one to mark this now one thing you have to be careful with is if you're Using reclaimed wood, there are no screws here because if you hit your hand on a screw or a nail rusts, you don't want to get tetanus and if you choose to use the saw, it will ruin your blades, so make sure you don't have screws or nails.

I was actually hitting those things so hard that the pencil appeared and disappeared. Watch the video for yourself. I want to know how deep this ceiling is. and it's basically 9 16. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to go into 9 16 and I'm going to figure out how far I want to go and I'm going to do that on both outside corners because you might make it easier. You could bolt this directly to this 4x4, but I don't want to do that because you could go over and snag your clothing here or worse, snag your thumb there and cut yourself like this, it will close those edges. and I'm going to cut those notches setting my saw at two and a quarter inches and then the depth I'm going to make 5 8. so it's going to be a little bit deeper than the thickness of the corrugated. metal, so when I went to cut this, I noticed it was a little aggressive, so I moved it back, I think two inches for the cut.

Now I have my saw set to three and one-eighth inches, which is what's in this space. It will be what turned out every time I measure the inside of the blade and now I just need to set the height of the blade where this section will cut. Here are a couple of things when you do this at any time. When you cut something like this, what you're cutting out is the camera focused on me. I hate this camera when you're cutting things like this where there's a particular pattern you have to follow don't rush it and have a brain fart or you'll end up cutting it you know you'll turn it the wrong direction and cut the wrong piece believe me I've done it many times, another interesting thing that I want to point out is and I love it. this cypress even though this cypress has been outside for I don't know about 10 years probably and when you open it look how beautiful it is, this is my favorite wood to work with outside and if you ever want cypress, you're probably not going to find this in his lumber yard.

I made this custom cut every time we built my daughter Riley's play set many years ago and used it on the gate when Madison and I built the garden gate a few videos ago that I had saved. this every time we take it down and I used this wood for that a couple of things I also want to tell you about the wood because the wood prices are so crazy right now if you go on Facebook there are people that do custom green wood milling , man, they say: Hey, this is my time to shine. I'll sell you a 2x4 for seven dollars instead of nine dollars, and if you're going to work on an outside project, it's probably fine to use green wood, but don't try it.

Don't buy green wood to save money on any project, especially if it's going indoors because it will just curl up on itself as it dries, unless you dry it in a kiln, which most of these places don't do. I'm not knocking freshly milled wood because it has its place, you just have to know what you're using it for and while we're talking about what wood you might use, if you're going to buy wood, don't feel like you have to. buy pressure treated lumber. Pressure treated wood will obviously last much longer, but pine or leather will last a long time.

I mean, you're talking about how long you want to be out of this pot. 10 to 15 years, don't buy pressure treated I see a lot of people building planters with pressure treated wood and they quote the FDA saying it's totally safe, if you want to look back at the history of the government saying things were safe but turned out not be. Be safe by all means, if you conclude that it is completely safe to build your planter with pressure treated wood, do it and then you will know that when you are hot, sit back and drink a nice cold glass of radium water.

I split that sheet of corrugated metal in half for each end and for that I can use my handy new cordless jigsaw from Milwaukee. That pencil doesn't look very good there and it didn't work all the time for a marker. It's not actually a marker at all, it's a Milwaukee ink saw that is not sponsored by Milwaukee, although if you would like to sponsor it, feel free to give me a call. Much nicer. Now you can use tin snips for this, but like I said, I'm going to use the jigsaw and I have a

hack

saw blade.

This is the first real use of this sheet. Well, the first complaint about this saw is a little hard to see. It may not be the best surface to cut it on. I will hit. those edges with some sandpaper use a file if you have a file you're probably wondering why I didn't break that sheet of metal with my bare hands and I sure could have, but I don't like to be a braggart. I like to keep it real for the people at home. Well, I wanted to show you these are the planters I built last year for Kim.

Obviously, they are

raised

off the ground, elevated, so to speak, and were made of cedar. the outer boxes and everything except the legs were made from normal leather. This is the riveter remix. These were made with leather four at a time and are perfectly fine, I mean yes it's only been a year but they are as solid as can be. You haven't seen that video. I'll put the video link here and check it out. I stole Kim's garden cart to get all this stuff out here. Be sure to use caution when moving this corrugated metal. It's probably best to wear gloves. but I like to live dangerously, so don't cut your hands, we started our garden, I don't know, we planted these potatoes, maybe they planted them a month ago and right after the tsunami came and we thought I probably lost them all, but they're all growing wonderfully.

I mean, I don't know if all of these show up. We'll probably end up with 300 pounds of potatoes here, but we'll see, so we have this section right here. We've changed everything in the way we were going to do this, so I'm going to put this garden pot right here, the potatoes stop there and here and uh, she's, oh, she's going to use this, I think for the strawberries. , so let's put it. together we're doing the back to Eden gardening method so we have all these wood chips here and these wood chips are four to eight inches deep so I have to get them out of the way but I will say that so far I'm really impressed with how well this has worked because other than that storm, you know, for several days, you know, maybe a week of

almost

a week of rain and then we haven't, we haven't.

I haven't watered this time and these potatoes are growing like crazy here, so so far so good. I'm going to take a piece of the roof, I'm going to line that top up and I'm going to pre-drill whenever necessary. pre-drilling for screws, okay, I actually picked them up, uh, these are four roofs, they have a little rubber grommet on the bottom of the screw, behind the head, whenever you're pre-drilling a screw, the bit that you use should be the size I mean many of you may know this, but the size of the center of the screw, not the thread, the actual solid piece of the screw between the threads, that's how big you want the hole that you're pre-drilling to be, so I'm going to go ahead and start here to start rolling and then work my way down.

In fact, I'm going to leave this because it would be easier if you're using something, if you're using a wood. Like cypress, this is a very soft wood, so you can remove the wood where the screw threads are very easily. This is where, if you have a second pair of hands, it would be helpful. I currently don't have them, so just make it work at this point. You could say it's done. It's just a

raised

bed. Who cares if everything is cattywampus and out of control? I'm just growing flowers in it, but that's not how I do it.

Well, I'm going to fix this. and I'm going to go up a level and let me show you if you don't know how to make sure when you're placing something like this whether it's square or not, the way you do it is you measure from that corner to this corner and that's 12 and an eight and then you measure from this corner to this corner and that's 111 and one eighth so I know I have to pull this to get this square, you want to divide the difference between those i'm at one hundred eleven and five eighths I'm at one eleven and five eighths it's

almost

like I know what I'm doing right the next thing I want to do is level it sideways and end to end and that level is okay so this end has to go down I was just going to say and when you do this be careful because that's when you'll cut yourself and I just cut my thumb so this is the part where you have to be careful or you'll cut yourself here is everything that burns below just to help with this buckling at the top.

I have to put one more screw around the top and that will help with some of that, but I'm also going to take this extra piece of wood that I had scrap and I cut it to fit and the way I did it was I measured from that extreme to that extreme where I know that if you measure from the middle you won't win. I don't do it right, so measure each end to end and then cut the piece of wood to that length. This would be the part where you would normally put a wooden cap here to prevent you from cutting your thumb on the top edge like I just did on the bottom edge, but remember at the beginning of the video when I showed you that I had bought this drip rail, yeah, that's right, we're going to put this drip rail on the top edge and that's going to give us some extra strength and a good, I mean, you can't cut yourself on this, okay, I went ahead and did what I should have done ago. 45 minutes and I put on some general gloves.

I have about 50 bucks on this project because I had the four by four that I could already use, so you know, worst case scenario, maybe you're at this 75 bucks, how much are you going to build a raised garden planter out of Four feet by eight feet by two feet deep for 50 to 75 dollars and is it nice? and sturdy this top edge there is no way I can cut myself fully protected shout out to corey the laser because he asked for it thanks for watching and see you next time