How long would it take you to build this?

[jives]

Kinda curious if my skills are really as lame as they seem to be. How long would it take you to build this raised bed (excluding filling it), which was my mothers' day gift to my wife? Table saw, cordless Makita circular saw, impact driver, and the normal complement of hand tools. The raised bed is 3' wide, x 8' long, x 2' tall. It is made of rough sawn black locust, 1 x 6 (full dimension), #2 grade ("mostly" straight), random lengths that needed to be cut down to size and to eliminate splits, wane, and nasty knots. All trim is 1 x 4 (ripped from the 1 x 6s), corner reinforcement on the inside are 4 x 4 PT, some locust stays are on the inside to help strengthen. All joints are **** joints, lots of deck screws. Pilot holes were necessary as was countersinking to avoid splitting.

Time to complete? Give me your best estimate.

 

[dougf]

Lets assume I got all the materials home (instead of going back and forth to Lowes like I normally do) and buckled down on it, with pilot holes and countersinking I could probably get it done in 3-4 hours if I had done it before. With breaks and never having done one, probably 5-6 if I stop to think and take my time. I **** at things like this though!

 

[RivennHewn]

About one six-pack

 

[Garcky]

4 hours, after thinking about it for about an hour or two. I'd make a lot of use of the radial arm saw. I'd also predrill all pilot holes in advance.

 

[solo machinist]

i would say 6-8 hrs for me.

 

[Hank11]

About an hour to an hour and a half if I had it all drawn out or real plans to follow. Does not count getting tools set up and put away.

I bet she likes it.

 

[Toomanytools?]

54 minutes

 

[whateg01]

Drilling holes with a combo drill/countersink would take half an hour, miter saw for all length wise cuts and table saw for the ripping, another 1.5 hours. Hour to assemble. Next one would go quicker. If it's a mix of cut, drill, cut again, fit, cut, drill, it would probably take twice as long.

 

[housewolf]

I am retired, I don’t measure my time in hours, I measure by days. One

 

[vwtrey]

Two hours.

 

[Old tool guy]

Standard response to my wife: 2 hours. She knows that’s a lie, expect it to take all day.

 

[jives]

OP here. I figured it would take about 4 hrs. In the end, about 9 hrs. It took time to strategize the cuts for the greatest use of straight planks, the 4 x 4s that formed the corner supports were warped scrap that required some adjustments. Not all the boards were exactly 6" wide, making necessary other adjustments to insure that all sides were the same width. I had to use clamps on occasion to straighten out warps prior to screwing. Had I assembly-lined the pilot holes and built it panel by panel it would have gone much faster. The corner trim was originally going to be big box joints (just for fun), but cutting the locust was difficult enough with good blades, and using my old dado set would have been a disaster. The top rail was going to be mitered at the corners, but the lack of uniformity of the wood may have made tight fits a challenge. I then decided to router the top rail edges and sand to eliminate splinter hazard.

Yup, took me longer than I thought. A saying I own as my wife chuckles. . .

 

[Leaflessshadetree]

Culling out the splits, knots etc and making efficient use of the material adds time as does ripping down material and predrilling. Nails also would be quicker than screws.
Filling it is another place where time could vary greatly. Does transportation time count? If i had a pile of material and could just scoop it up and dump it in with a loader it woud take a minute or so. If I could shovel directly from the truck into it would be a little more.
Is it just filled with soil or do you have a variety of materials?

9 hours isn't too long. I'd estimate 3-5 hours if I had everthing organized and wasn't too particular.

 

[driftpin]

Is there a bottom floor?

I made a planter for our son, it has a floor. Exterior construction screws, joints glued & screwed. Full-dimension rough-cut cedar.

 

[nadogail]

How much time am I allowed?

Add ten %

 

[Shiftless]

I built one just like that but my boards were PT from a real lumber yard so no ripping needed. It took about 3 hours but part of it was stapling on half inch galvanized mesh to keep gophers from burrowing up from underneath.

 

[rayra]

3hrs if you have prior experience and work slow.

 

[isb cornbinder]

It took me about 12 minutes to achieve the same result. I called a builder in the afternoon and 24 hours later I had my wife's b'day present in the yard. The 4 raised beds was about $1200

 

[Kuma601]

I've learned that whatever time I think it is going to take it will be 3X that. If I've done it before it will go to the estimated time or maybe a few ticks faster.

 

[southalabama]

It takes what it takes. Unless you are on someone’s clock do it as whatever pace suits you.

 

[Meursault74]

including the clean up time after?

Whatever I "think" a woodworking project should take me it takes 2-3 times as long. I don't do this everyday, I'll have to go get more wood if I make a mistake, so I go slow and measure 3-4 times and cut once. It takes what it takes and that's it.

To the OP, your time on the project is fine as it was DIY. Did you enjoy the process?

 

[jives]

The bottom is 1/4" galvanized mesh to keep out the voles. This is one reason for the raised bed in the first place. They decimate the garden plants.

Clean up took a couple of hours. It seemed I used every tool I own, dust was everywhere (no dust collection system). Filling the bed took another 4 hrs or so. First, I needed to transport from the garage to garden. Lifted front on a hand truck and secured that to my garden tractor. Lifted the back and put on a dolly, and then pulled the thing to the garden. Filled the bottom with about 6" of sticks and logs, followed by about 6" of compost, followed by 12" of topsoil/compost blend from a local guy. Had to fetch the topsoil, haul it with a farm wagon, then shoveled from wagon to garden cart attached to garden tractor, haul to the raised bed, shovel to fill the bed. 4 hrs.

 

[FlaGman]

In my working days, I obsessed about how long a task took. I would time myself on repetitive tasks and set myself times to beat on big projects. I was never without a watch and checked it frequently.

In retirement I am the opposite. I don’t wear a watch and don’t really care how long something takes unless I am trying to beat the rain on an outdoor task. OP, your project turned out great! I would have set aside a day for it, but I can see how it would run longer with sizing/ culling the material.

 

[WisJim]

My wife has lots of experience with our construction projects over 50+ years, including building our first house using just hand tools and local rough saw mill lumber. Her rule of thumb is to take my estimate of time required, double it, and add a week. She is often correct, but over the years I think that the "add a week" has been excessive for small jobs.
We built our last set of raised garden beds out of rough cedar 4x4s that were a great deal, and planned sizes so minimal cutting was required. We also used hardware cloth on the bottom for the vole and mole and gopher problem.

 

[mepstein]

It takes what it takes. Unless you are on someone’s clock do it as whatever pace suits you.

Exactly. Don’t measure yourself next to others. For my wife, the only thing that matters is it gets done.

 

[Steve W.]

I figured it would take about 4 hrs. In the end, about 9 hrs. ...

Yup, took me longer than I thought. A saying I own as my wife chuckles. . .

My experience would have been much like yours.

I learned long time ago how to interpret estimates. Take the number, double it. Take the unit of measure and go to the next one. That means that your "4 hour" estimate becomes "8 days".

.

 

[Spud McGee]

Did you drive the uprights into the ground? Did you dig a footer all the way around and fill it with gravel and tamp it level? Or it is just a box sitting on the ground? Depending on how unlevel the ground is and how tough it is to dig, I could spend 1-3 hours just digging that out and making it level.

How square is the thing? Did you just eyeball it? Did you use a framing square and call it good? Did you layout 4 strings ahead of time and make those perfectly square and then use those as a guide to build the box? You could add another hour or so if you really went out of your way to make sure the thing was square as you were building it.

How optimized was your workflow? Did you setup a stop block for the miter saw so you could cut all your boards the same length as the same time? Or did you measure every single one? Did you have several drills and drivers laid out so you weren't spending time swapping drill bits back and forth 500 times?

If this were me, it would have a gravel or rock footer all the way around and I would be using strings to build it square. I'd batch cut my boards ahead of time so whatever length they happened to be, I would know what save to make the footer and layout the string. Get the whole thing framed up and tacked together. And then run around it with a couple drills and zap in all my screws. It would probably take 6+ hours the first time. If I had to do it again and it was still fresh in my head, the next ones would take like 3 hours.

And if i knew ahead of time I was having to make multiple of this, I would setup jigs and each one would take 1 hour.

 

[paredown]

I've learned that whatever time I think it is going to take it will be 3X that. If I've done it before it will go to the estimated time or maybe a few ticks faster.

My experience would have been much like yours.

I learned long time ago how to interpret estimates. Take the number, double it. Take the unit of measure and go to the next one. That means that your "4 hour" estimate becomes "8 days".

.

This was a Murphy's Law corollary--take the time estimated, square it [or double it], and raise to the next highest unit.

If you think two hours, it will take you four days. This is especially applicable in redoing old plumbing, since you have to make at least four trips to your nearest supply house if you don't have the loaded truck parked outside.

My standard response to my lovely wife is 'Good work takes time.'

 

[HPRifleman]

By coincidence, my wife built this a few weeks ago. The longer bed is 2' x 8' and the two smaller ones are 2' x 4'.



The 2x8's and 2x10's were repurposed from the raised beds in our existing garden. She spent a lot of time pulling those out and dragging them to the new spot. The 4x4's were new and had to be cut to size. Cabinet mounting screws were used to join all the wood together. Almost all of the materials we already had somewhere on the property.

The walls were assembled with open bottoms. Holes were drilled in the sides and small PVC drain pipes were installed. The plastic liners were placed and enclose the bottom and sides. The corrugated pipe was laid down and rock was dumped in up to about the first layer of 2x8. The remaining height was filled in with dirt (again, from the existing garden).

It took her a couple of weekends to do all this. I helped with moving some of the heavy stuff but it was her project. If I was involved I would have required a full set of drawings, a capital expenditure request, failure mode analysis, an FEA report, and validation results.

 

[zippyslug31]

I figured it would take about 4 hrs. In the end, about 9 hrs.

Sounds about right; I was thinking to myself "1 day". This assumes you had everything you needed and at least a rough idea of what you're trying to build. You did it right as far as I'm concerned.

 

[ycgoat]

I built some many years ago (not sure how long it took) using 2x10 PT, now they are raised weed beds that I have to weed eat around and they are outlasting my deck.

 

[niget2002]

It would take me all day, but I'd have about half a dozen side-quests as my ADD took over.

 

[sea2summit]

I'd say 3-6 hours depending on how much site prep/leveling is required and how far I have to move the dirt to fill it. 2-4 if I can use a my tractor.

 

[Hooked]

My experience would have been much like yours.

I learned long time ago how to interpret estimates. Take the number, double it. Take the unit of measure and go to the next one. That means that your "4 hour" estimate becomes "8 days".

.

This. It would have taken me a couple days to get things together then multiple trips to the lumber yard during the project then breaks to think about how to correct the mis-cuts, etc. Yeah, 8 days may have been enough. LOL

 

[Jackfre]

Well, given that there is not short story that I can’t turn inot a long story, it depends upon how many people are around.

 

[tncatadjuster]

So many variables was it built in place? A full day probably, it seems to have precision construction as in it looks great and not thrown together. I mean look at it...nice. I have a friend that will estimate a job and my father and I laugh and say multiply by the 3.2 factor for you Lario.

 

[HalfTonTom]

Nicely done. My formula for time estimation is guess how long it will take, double it and add one (hour, day, minute; whatever the interval of measurement was for the guess). For example, the OP's estimate fits this formula exactly. Four hours times two, plus one hour = nine hours.

Your mileage may vary.

 

[RaisedByWolves]

It would take me all day, but I'd have about half a dozen side-quests as my ADD took over.

You speed demon you.

For me, 6 weeks minimum.

7 if the deer are around.

 

[gtae07]

At my usual rate of progress? A month, at least, if not two. Because on the one day a week when I have a few hours to do projects, every twenty minutes I'd be interrupted by my 7 year old or my wife wondering when I was going to be done, or there'd be a higher priority urgent thing needing attention.

And this time of year, forget it.

 

[eejack]

1 weekend. One day to figure out what I needed, gather material and organize the tools, screws, gotsundgeils, then level a bit of the property ( we live on a hill, there is no flat ).

Then a day to build it and clean up.

Add a day if family helps, shorten it a day if it is raining ( the dog doesn't like the rain and he wouldn't be 'helping' me...gotta find the picture of him dragging my circular saw across the yard )

Very nice job btw.