Benches for a Woodland Amphitheater

If you've got a patch of land in the woods or along the lake, you've probably wanted to sit out there, maybe listen to a little music, throw a jam session, build a campfire and sit with some friends and swap stories. When I was raising my kids, we used to have sundown worship sessions by a campfire with kids from the church. It's nice to have a little outdoor meeting place on your property.

It's surprisingly easy to build an amphitheater too. The first thing you have to do is find a nice sloped place. It doesn't have to be a steep slope, just an easy slope that lifts the back rows above the rows in front so you can see those guitar and banjo players standing down front. The benches can be set level by paralleling the slope and adjusting the height of the posts so that when you sit on the bench you have a clear view of the open area in front of the benches.

Decide how many benches you want in your natural chapel or theater and measure the length the benches need to cover and how many of them you need to make. The benches will be about a foot high and 10 to 12 inches wide. Use the wider planks for older audiences (you know why, so don't ask).

Figure out the seating capacity you are looking for. A ten foot bench seats about 7 people comfortably. If you want to seat 70 people, then ten benches would just about do it or about 100 running feet of bench. You can daisy chain the benches shown on the right by screwing the ends of two planks to a single post and then just continuing along the tops of posts, screwing it down about every 4 feet.

You can also follow the contour of the terrain by angling the cuts on the ends of the planks where two come together so that the bench turns to follow the curve of the hill. You can leave gaps in seating to accommodate boulders, trees or other terrain features you wish to preserve.

Once the seating is in, you can construct as elaborate or simple a stage area as you want. There's nothing quite as peaceful as a chapel in the woods or along a lake shore. Throw in a guitar and some campfire tunes - a moonlit night. It doesn't get much better than that.

Really!

Tom

If you have some land, you can create your very own woodland chapel. It's not the kind of family chapel you would find in an English Castle, but it does give your family a gathering place of its own. You can have weddings there, vesper services, campfires and weenie roasts.

It's one of those kinds of special places the kids will remember when you are a grandpa or grandma and your kids drop off their young-uns with you for a week or so in the summer. You'll find the kids drawn to the place and if they take up musical instruments along the way, your little family amphitheater can be the site for their first musical concert.

You need a place for these sorts of things. Having special places for growing children and places nearby for old people to sit down to watch them while they are growing is one of those secrets to aging well. Military commanders always like to choose good ground upon which to fight their battles. In the battle of raising decent loving families, it's important to lay out your ground to your advantage.

You want to make sure that ground has strategically placed benches on it.

Just sayin'

Tom King