How to Build a Modern Herb Garden

What's up world this is Brad from Project Build Stuff and today we're making a modern herb garden. Let's talk materials. We're going to use one by six cedar fence posts for this entire build. You're going to need seven in total. You should be out the door for less than $25. Let's get to the build. We're going to start with the leg construction which we'll need two 30 inch pieces for. Eventually we're going to rip these down into two inch strips but for now we'll just cut them down to their 30 inch length. The final piece we're going to need for our legs is our back stretcher which we're going to cut to 23 and three quarters. Our leg components are good to go for now let's jump into our plant boxes. The sides of the plant box are parallelogram that we're going to cut at 12 degrees. I set up a stop block here on my miter saw at five and one eighth inch. Don't worry about remembering all these measurements they'll all be in the plans. We're going to be able to cut all eight of our side pieces out of one board. Just cut a 12 degree angle on the end and then slide it your stop block. Keep cutting until you get to eight. We're going to finish off our plant box by getting our fronts and bottom all cut to length. We're going to cut all 12 of these pieces to the same length of 22 and a half inches. Okay we got everything cut to length we should have five different length boards in total. Let's jump onto the table saw and set our fence to two inches. We're going to grab our leg assembly pieces that we started with and rip them all down to their final width. So to achieve the cool angle of the plant boxes we need to cut the front bottom and back on a 12 degree angle. This should create a parallelogram when you look at it from the end. Let's get our table saw blade tilted to 12 degrees and then we can rip that bevel down the side of every one of our boards we have left. Nobody's paying me to say this but times like this I love this gripper. Now that all of our box components have a bevel on one edge we're going to take eight of those pieces and rip them down to five and an eighth. Be sure you run the longest point of your bevel across the bottom of the fence to ensure that your two bevels are parallel to each other. Maybe that's why they call it a parallelogram. Our final four pieces will be used for the bottom of the boxes. They have the same angle on them the only difference is we're cutting them to four and a half inches. Everything's cut let's get this thing put together. We're going to be using brad nails for the whole assembly no glue needed. We're going to kick off our assembly by getting all of our boxes nailed together. Don't worry too much if your edges don't line up perfectly that's what sandpaper is for. Most of the structure of these boxes is going to come from these end panels but I do like to drive a couple nails into the bottom just for added strength. Well that was easy let's just repeat that process three more times. Can you do it as fast as me? My brad nailer isn't the best so I always have to go back and drive a few nails home. Now let's go fix all those little mistakes with some sandpaper. Man those plant boxes look sharp let's move on to the legs. You know me I love a little modern aesthetic so I splayed out these back legs at a 12 degree angle. We're going to set our miter gauge to 12 degrees and cut two of our leg boards to this 12 degree angle. Only cut one end of each of these boards we'll deal with the other end later. For our other two legs you can see we need a much steeper 50 degree angle so we're going to set our miter gauge to that and cut the other two. Again only cut this angle on one end of the board we'll deal with the bottoms once we're done with assembly. We're going to use the box shape as our reference here. Make sure that your leg is flush on the top and back with the box before you start nailing. The front leg simply bumps up against the back and is flush to the top. Once you have all four legs attached clean up your joints with a little sandpaper. To attach the remaining three boxes we're going to flip the whole assembly over and clamp two inch spacer boards to the bottom of the first box. As you slide your boxes in be sure the bottom is facing up and the front corner of your box is perfectly lined up with the front edge of your leg. A little trick that I learned is you can swivel your clamp so that your box is nice and tightly clamped to your leg no gap. Drive home a few nails on each side the more the merrier really. Make sure we're nice and strong and then move on to the next one. Once you have your last box installed keep the spacers in place and flip your whole assembly over. We want our back stretcher to be even with our bottom box so we're going to reference it against the same spacers as we nail it in. Almost done. Last step is to level out our feet. It gets a little front heavy here so I found it's easiest to clamp it to the bench. We're going to clamp our spacer board to the bottom of our front box in order to create a straight edge and a guide for our saw. In this case I'm using a Japanese pull saw which makes quick work of these boards. The bottom of the box makes a great reference for the front legs. Wow that looks pretty sharp. I hit mine with some spar urethane but it's totally optional as cedar does great outside on its own. Thanks for watching and as always it's your turn go build stuff go go watch something else