At the end of winter/early Spring, we had a couple of pine trees taken down in the backyard. And while you know we’re always up for DIY, there was no way I was letting Dan climb a tree and swing around like a little monkey. So we had someone else help us out.

Side story: I watched the trees come down piece by piece, and overall it seemed to be an easy process. Until the tree guy got to the last part of the trunk, and “misprojected” how tall it was. Timberrrr, and the trunk went crashing into our fence.

That was fun (not), but honestly an easy fix. We had some work to do on the fence anyway, which is another post for another day.

But anyway, we had the tree guy cut a few of the trunks into smaller logs. The tree was about a foot wide, and we had about two foot pieces cut. He also split a few for us, giving us a flat edge that just screamed to be made into something cool. And that’s where we come in.

This first thing Dan did was strip the bark off of the trunk sections, getting rid of all the dead, rotted wood.

He then sanded them down to smooth out any some of the rougher sections of the bare wood.

Get where we’re going with this yet? It’s okay, we didn’t either. But as we went on. Dan decided to make two benches and two end tables out of the tree trunk.

The end table would stand right side up, with the flat section at both the top and bottom. The pieces were cut perfectly, so after sanding, all that was needed was a few layers of poly, and they were good to go.

As for the benches, Dan used 2x4s as the legs and criss-crossed them underneath the “split” log for extra support. We painted these black to contrast with the natural wood of the trunk.

After adding a few layers of poly to the bench, all that was left to do was take a seat and put our feet up.

This is probably one of the more unique projects we came up with, and definitely plays into the theme of the garage that we’re deeming “rustic, industrial.” Come winter, we’ll use them as benches (or maybe penalty boxes) for the ice rink that Dan wants to build in the backyard. Oh boy.