DIY Benches and Frames!!

My friend and neighbor invited me and a few girls over to her place Saturday, Feb. 12th, to build benches! (I kinda forgot to blog about this.)  We got the idea from this DIY furniture blog.  This was one of the easier pieces of furniture she had listed, so we figured why not try building it?!  We had a lot of fun together!  Thanks Lori for planning such a fun activity.  Oh, and thanks Cameron for letting me leave for over 3 hours to work on this!

Building my bench, and to the right are my frames (A few of us decided to make frames too!!)

Annie and Kaitlin building their frames.

Susan and Amy, yes that's right!  We used nail guns!

Amy

Lori

And of course, I had to nail my finger!  Here's the story...I was holding the top board onto the rest of the bench.  I went to staple the top while holding my fingers on the side of the bench to hold it in place and...well it came out the side and punctured my left pointer finger!  I just felt a little pressure but when I looked down there was a ton of blood flowing out of my finger like a fountain!  I didn't know what was going on, I didn't really have any pain and it looked like someone had shot me, there was tons of blood going everywhere!  Lori ran and got a paper towel to wrap around it and so sweetly cleaned up all the blood from her basement floor.  I finally went up stairs to clean myself off, but I was so scared to see what it looked like, I knew I was going to have to have stitches, there was no other explanation for losing so much blood right?  Well, when I took off the paper towel the blood had completely stopped and I only had a tiny hole.  What?  I still don't know exactly why it bled so much.  As the day continued my finger grew more swollen and could only bend my finger maybe 90 degrees, at the most!  It started really hurting, but finally after a few days the swelling and pain went down.  What's weird is, this happened almost 4 weeks ago and my finger still hurts at times.  I can't bend it all the way w/o a little pain, or put pressure on it, like using it to push anything (like snapping button's together) it hurts a lot then!  Weird right?

The finished bench, I still need to paint it.

And, my custom built frames for these wonderful paintings my Mother-in-law gave us!  (Yes, she painted them herself!!!)  I still need to figure out how I'm going to paint the frames, and also how to keep the paintings in place behind the frame, any ideas?

Anyways, we had tons of fun, other than the bloody incident of mine, these were great starter projects for our future projects!