My girlfriend at the time was getting into planting herbs but only had a balcony at her apartment. I decided to build her an “over the railing planter box”. The box was made to fit over a 2 x 6 railing (so 5.5″ wide channel down the middle). I also wanted to incorporate handles and for it to properly drain.
The handles were easy enough – just used a jigsaw to cut crescent shaped notches out of a piece of 2 x 4 and then screwed them into the base from underneath. The draining challenged me (at the time). I wanted to the bottom of the planting boxes themselves to be angled so that the water would properly fall out the bottom and not sit on the wood for a long period of time – as I thought this would increase inevitable wood rot.
I made this box mostly with screws (and some Kreg-ing), but looking back I must have glued the diagonal bottoms into place as I don’t see screw holes.
I painted the box several times to try to get what I thought would be a water-proof layer of paint on it. In the end I used some heavy duty white spray paint to get a smoother finish that seemed worthy of withstanding prolonged sun and rain.
