Dummy Plans for Planters

wooden planter box

The people who brought you eHow.com (now known as Leaf Group) operated under the conceit that their "multi-point auditing system" helped them publish "the best information." Of course, anyone who paid attention knew that using ignorant freelancers to research information and equally ignorant freelancers to fact-check their work was never going to provide "the best information." This paucity of quality was especially obvious when those charged with fact-checking either didn't check the references or didn't understand them. Strange, but true... as in the case of Jesse Dempsen, whose GardenGuides.com article "How to Build a Planter Box From Fence Boards"¹ is a sparkling example.

Dempsen isn't a journalism grad, but he teaches journalism... so certainly Jesse should know that references are supposed to contain or support the information he passed along, but one is merely a blog entry that links to lots of places selling window boxes, and the other is plans for something entirely different. Weird, huh? In other words, no written plans.
Dempsen's plans are, to be blunt, impossible to build. Someone who's done a little carpentry work in the past could figure out how to modify them to make sense, but a beginner? Naaahhhh... Here's why: for instance, Jesse says to,

"Rip 1-by-1 strips of wood from a 1-by-6..."

Here's news for Jesse: you can't cut a 1-by-1 strip from a 1-by-6, because a 1-by-6 is only ¾" thick. Even worse, fence pickets are usually only ⁵⁄₈" thick. Jesse's directions then say to cut those 1-by-1s into "angled pieces" 28 inches long and  "angled pieces" 12 inches long, then make two frames out of them (we know he means mitered, but apparently he doesn't know the word). You're supposed to take four 8-inch strips of 1-by-1 and attach the two frames together to make the outline of a box.
Finally, attach 30-inch 1-by-8 boards to the outside of the 28-inch sides and 12-inch boards to the short sides. Jesse doesn't mention what to do an overhang of either ½" or ¾", depending on the thickness of the fence pickets (which, we remind you aren't actually 1" thick). Even more to the point, he doesn't seem to be aware that his construct is ten inches tall (two frames of 1-by-1s and the 8-inch spacers) while his 1-by-8 sides are only 7¼ inches tall.

That's gonna look like something a Dumbass of the Day would make... another freelancer who doesn't know the dimensions of lumber. Oh, yeah, and it doesn't have a bottom...

¹ The original has been deleted by Leaf Group, but can still be accessed using the Wayback machine at archive.org. Its URL was   ehow.com/how_8418060_build-planter-box-fence-boards.html

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