Make your own garden trellis using scrap bits of wood and a little imagination.
I am SO EXCITED!
Rust-Oleum.ca just sent a super-secret shipment so that I can makeover my garage floor! I guess that I didn’t really keep that secret eh? lol
It’s going to be a BEAST of a job – mostly because my garage is jam-packed with projects right now, and I’m going to have to re-home everything to get at the floors. 🤦🏻♀️
I started yesterday by selling off my sports lockers:
You can see the full locker makeover from grey, factory lockers to this fun blue on the blog. Yesterday I moved them out of the garage and pressure washed them before the new owners came to get them.
I also did a dump-run to get rid of all of the building materials that I couldn’t repurpose into something else and then I started filtering through my scraps.
As you know, I build a lot of my projects from repurposed wood. My parent’s old fence, dismantled bookcase and leftover bits from larger projects. This means that, more often than not, I have to rip down or plane down boards from the original width or thickness to what I need to complete my project. Where possible, my planer shavings become guinea pig bedding, and the ripped down bits are used to trim out furniture – like my corner cabinet the other day.
Sometimes there are pieces that are just too thin to be any good for anything.
Or so I thought!
These skinny bits are the equivalent of ½” square dowels – a little nerve racking to rip down, but SO gratifying to use them up and not put them in the landfill.
As always, please be VERY careful around power tools and always wear the appropriate safety gear – this DIY trellis may be the size of a finger, but it’s not worth losing one for.
There’s really no rhyme or reason to my scrap wood trellis build – I took what I had and putzed away.
There were four 60″ lengths of wood in my scrap bin, so I used those as my verticals.
I figured vines could reach about 6″ before sagging (total guesstimate – I have no idea if that’s true), so I put my four verticals side by side and marked lines across them every 6″
Aesthetically, I thought a 24″ wide trellis would look nice against a fence or wall, so I cut the smaller scraps to that length.
Then it was just a matter of gluing (with outdoor-appropriate glue) and stapling the horizontal boards onto the verticals at the lines I’d marked.
SO SIMPLE!!
Not a complicated pattern or build, and this scrap wood trellis is kinda pretty. I can picture clematis vines or morning glories delicately creeping up.
(It’s snowing here right now, so I can’t stage it with plants just yet.)
My pile had some wider scraps as well, so I played away with other patterns to see what I could come up with.
These angled pieces were cut at a 30° (perpendicular) angle on each end. I found the centre point of the centre board and had each board meet at that line – my rows are 6″ apart.
The glue and staples are hidden on the back side of the scrap wood trellis, but even with the staple side out, they are pretty inconspicuous.
By the time I reached this third DIY trellis, I was really scrounging for bits – particularly verticals that were tall enough to give a vine a growing chance.
These angled boards were cut at a 45° angle on each end (to mirror the squares in the centre). This trellis ended up being about 17″ wide; a perfect fit to tuck into a planter pot!
Total fluke – but I’ll take the win!
Home improvement stores sell trellises for $30 and up – so I thought I’d post mine on Facebook marketplace. It sold immediately for $20! It’s a win all around!
These were really fun to make and a fantastic way to repurpose otherwise unusable wood!
One more pile cleaned out of the garage!
Have a great one!