I first saw an outdoor bench like this one a long time ago, at the shop of a pro woodworker in Idaho, Mark Edmundson, who was selling them because they were so quick to make yet so pretty. Ten years later, when I set out to design a little bench, made from standard deck boards and a box of screws, I didn’t intend to copy Mark’s design. But when I finished sketching and prototyping and refining, I realized I had come up with something similar, with the pieces of 2x2s and 2x4s in the uprights combining in a similar way to create the square hole for a long 2×4 beam to pass through. There just aren’t that many ways to skin this cat, and Mark’s method rules, apparently.

Luckily for me, and you, Edmundson didn’t mind sharing his great idea (I checked!). Mark is a…