Build a 4×8 Raised Garden Bed for $50! This Hack Makes it Stronger With No Wood (almost)

hey guys welcome back to the show today i want to build a planter that is four foot by eight foot by two foot deep and i can confirm as i have just returned from the lumber yard that wood prices are freaking insane two by fours that used to cost less than two bucks are now closer to nine dollars so i wanted to build this garden box with as little wood as possible and so what i've done here is let me show you what i've got in the truck okay first off as i'm sure you've seen before one mini garden planter builds just got some corrugated roofing this stuff is cheap this stuff is like 15 a sheet for a two foot by eight foot section so that's what the sides of the box are going to be made out of and then i also got some of this drip rail and i'll explain later how i'm going to use this i got three sheets of that excuse me three strips of that i'll be using that but i also i mean i'm gonna need a little bit of wood for this i tried to figure out if there's a way i could do this without using any wood at all and the problem i mean of course there is but it wasn't really going to be a savings in any way saving this old cypress from the girls playset from years ago has turned out to be a very wise decision even though it's been a pain to store now if you don't get off there if you don't have a couple cypress 4x4s hanging around your house don't sweat that because i'm going to be using such a tiny amount of wood in this project that i guarantee you you can find the wood you'll need even if you have to use pallet wood or wood behind somebody's shed somebody will have the tiny amount of wood you need for this garden planter box thingamajigger okay let's get let's go oh i was gonna try to do this mostly outside it's actually a pretty nice day out but the sand nats are horrible so i'm going to try to do part of it inside and part outside [Music] [Applause] first thing i want to do is verify that these actually are 24 inches and they are not they are in fact 26 and 3 16 tall so look at that i got more for my money than i expected the four by fours are going to go in the corners of the bed to provide structural support i need to mark out the 26 and 3 16 on here and then you can either you can cut these on the chop saw if you want you could cut it with a circular saw you could cut it with a hand saw i don't really want to put a lot of dust did i just say i'm going to have them in a minute but i was about i don't want to put a lot of dust in the shop so i'm just going to judo chop these okay hey all right first cut bring that down i'll actually use this one to mark this now one thing you do want to be careful of is if they're if you're using reclaimed wood that there's no screws in here because if you hit your hand on a screw or a nail rusting out you don't want to get tetanus also if you do choose to use the saw you'll ruin your blades so make sure you're free of screws or nails all right i was actually smacking those things so hard the pencil was popping in and out of existence check the video for yourself i want to find out what the depth of this roofing is and it is basically 9 16. so what i'm going to do is come in 9 16 and i'll figure out what how far over i want to go and i'll do that on both outside corners because you could ease you could you could just screw this straight into this 4×4 but i don't want to do that because you could come by and you could snag your clothes on here or worse snag your thumb on there and cut yourself this way it'll close those edges in and i'm going to cut those notches out by setting my saw up at two and a quarter inches and then the depth i'm going to make 5 8. so that'll be just a little bit deeper than the thickness of the corrugated metal [Music] so when i went to cut this i noticed that that was a little aggressive so i moved it back to i think two inches for the cut now i've got my saw set to three and an eighth inches which is what this space right here will be what it worked out to whenever i measure to the inside of the blade and now i just need to set the blade height to where it'll chop this section right here out [Music] [Music] [Music] a couple of things when you're doing this anytime you're cutting something like this where you're cutting out is the camera focused on me i hate this camera when you're cutting stuff like this where there's a particular pattern that you're having to follow don't get in a hurry and have a brain fart or you'll end up cutting off you know you'll spin it around the wrong way and cut the wrong piece off believe me i've done that plenty of times another cool thing i want to point out is and i love this cypress even though this cypress this cypress has been outside for i don't know about 10 years probably and when you cut it open look how beautiful it is this is my favorite wood to work with outside and if you ever do want cypress you're probably not going to find this at your lumber yard i had this custom milled whenever we built my daughter riley's play set many years ago and and i used it in the gate when madison and i built the garden gate a few videos back i had saved this whenever we took it down and i used this lumber for that one thing a couple things too i want to tell you about lumber because lumber prices are so crazy right now if you go on facebook people that do custom milling of green lumber man they're like hey this is my time to shine i'll sell you a 2×4 for seven dollars instead of nine dollars and if you're gonna be working on a project outside it's probably fine to use green lumber but don't don't try don't buy green lumber to save money on any project especially that's going to go inside because it's just going to roll up on itself as it dries unless you happen to get it kiln dried which most of these places don't do so i'm not knocking fresh milled lumber because it has its place just know what you're using it for and while we're talking about the wood you might use if you do go to buy wood don't don't feel like you have to buy pressure treated lumber pressure treated lumber obviously is going to last a lot longer but pine or fur will last a long time i mean you're talking about how long do you want to get out of this planter box 10 15 years don't buy pressure treated i see a lot of people building planter boxes out of pressure treated lumber and they'll cite that the fda says that it's totally safe well if you want to look back at the history of government saying things were safe that turned out to not be safe by all means if you come to the conclusion that it's totally safe to build your planter box out of pressure treated lumber do so and then you know when you get hot sit back and drink a nice cool glass of radium water i'm gonna split that sheet of corrugated metal in half for each end and for that i get to use my brand new handy dandy cordless jigsaw from milwaukee that pencil doesn't show up very well in there and that didn't work at all time for a sharpie actually it's not a sharpi