Wooden Garden Display Unit Project - Part 2

I’ve been making slow but steady progress over the last few weeks. The garden shelf furniture is now taking shape and I can start to see some light at the end of the tunnel. I wanted to use this space to share some of that progress in photos, and discuss next steps.

The piece of wood on the right is the bottom panel that the poles will slot into. The wood on the left is in the process of being cut and will be one of the two central panels.

The next step is to finish the top section which, along with the base, will hold the whole unit together. I’ll then need to glue it and assess how strong it is without any screws or nail support - it should be fine. There are also a few oversized cuts or gaps that I will be filling to ensure a smooth finish - a result of using the marine plywood, which, as mentioned in the prior post, was the wrong type of wood to be cutting joints.

I have cut these little slots out of all the vertical pieces of wood so that the central panels can slot inside and rest. The panels should remain sturdy by themselves but I will add some glue to secure them.

Once the whole thing has glued and dried, the decoration panels will be measured, cut and applied. I was considering cutting them into the main bars but I think that could be a recipe for disaster so now they will be glued on top. Maybe I'll still give it a go, it all depends how confident I feel at the time of doing it. Whatever I decide, it's likely i’ll need to do some extra filling just to smooth the surface ready for priming.

This is the progress so far in regards to construction. The side pieces are also all cut and ready to slot in but they are less sturdy without the top section so I have left them out of this for now.