There’s a bus on my balcony

More obscene than Usher’s tour bus, more imposing than a freight train. You don’t expect to wake up and see a double decker bus on your balcony. How did it get there? Well, we kinda sorta built it.

Going crazy with pre-spring fever, I was hatching all sorts of ideas for potting benches and green walls. The things I’d have in a farm house with acres of space, and the projects I’d undertake there.

Couldn’t we have it all? No? We live in an apartment?

Selective hearing kicked in. At one end of our balcony, we could install a potting bench. Its uses – many-many-many. Its lower shelf could house two worm bins, side by side, with space for soil and empty pots beside. On the table surface, room to transplant, and space for smaller pots. Behind the table, running to the top of the balcony: a trellis thickly covered in ivy.

Inevitably, as with any hobby, our gardening stuff accumulates: errant trowels and shears, bags of soil, and all kinds of garbage I think might have a gardening application – whether toilet roll tubes (seedling pot) or empty water bottles (ghetto cloche). The potting bench would be a proper garden HQ finally accomplished on an apartment balcony.

Perhaps it was the chance to build something, but Paolo was in. We measured up and crafted some blueprints. I insisted I wanted it to be a tall table – bar height – so as to work without bending down.

I held my hands out at “potting level” and Paolo measured the distance to the ground. We planned the rest of the table plan from there, and busted out to Home Depot to get some wood.

Cedar was ideal, but expensive for our purposes. Pressure treated was cheaper, but green and unappetizing. We settled on the cheapest {spruce?}, knowing we’d later stain and seal it to match the patio furniture. The cheapest option also weighed the least – always a concern when hauling lumber into elevators and leaving it on a balcony.

Home we went, and build we did. A simple frame with a slatted bottom shelf and table top. Our wonky construction soon began to look more table-like. That is, until we nailed on the top and the table better resembled a double-decker bus. All four Boxcar Children and their dog could have moved in.

Ohhhhhhh. I forgot that stuff would be on the table –

I’d held my hands at the height I wanted to work. Anything on the table adds height. It would be hard to plant seeds in even a small pot, as the dirt would be above eye level. Our monster was at least six inches too tall.

Sensing that cutting off the legs was ill-advised, we took that night to nurse wounded egos and began from scratch the next morning. After pulling apart the entire thing, our naive design was easily rectified and made eight inches shorter. Just add some sunshine and twice-as-warm weather & she’s ready to roll.

Par-for-the-course stupidity as first-time builders?

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Photos c/o malias and abarndweller via Flickr Creative Commons