Why a Handcrafted Ski Bench for a Porch Beats Store-Bought
There’s a twenty minute stretch on a July evening when the light goes gold behind the ridge and the porch finally goes quiet. Boots are off. The dog has claimed the middle of the bench again, like he pays rent. That twenty minutes is what a handcrafted ski bench for a porch is actually for, and it’s why a lot of people give up on the plastic loveseat that came with the house.
What a Handcrafted Ski Bench Actually Is
Let’s start with the unglamorous part, because that’s where most outdoor furniture quietly falls apart. A handcrafted ski bench is seating built from repurposed downhill skis fastened to a Douglas Fir base. Not a veneer. Not a photograph of skis printed onto composite board. Actual skis, the ones that spent a decade getting beaten up on a mountain, cut and drilled and fitted into a seat and a seat back by a person standing at a workbench in Manitou Springs, Colorado.
Take the Colorado Mountain Adirondack Ski Bench. It stands 47 inches tall, runs 62 inches wide and 36 inches deep, and seats two adults with room left for the dog who is convinced the middle spot belongs to him. High quality exterior oil paint, the same category of finish that keeps a wooden boat alive through a season. 3 year hassle free warranty. Yup.
The word handcrafted gets thrown around until it means nothing, so here’s the practical version. Nobody is pulling these off a pallet in a warehouse. Each one is made to order, generally two to four weeks, and the skis going into yours are not the skis that went into the last one. Different graphics, different vintages, different lengths. That means a small amount of variation from photo to finished piece, which is the honest tradeoff for owning something nobody else on your street has. If you need twelve of them to match for a lodge entry, we can get close, and we’ll tell you on the phone exactly where the limits are instead of after your card clears.
Compare that to the flat pack bench that arrives in a box with an Allen wrench and a diagram of a confused stick figure. It’ll be fine for two seasons. Then the fasteners start weeping rust down the legs and the slats cup, and you’re back on a website in April looking at the same bench again. A ski bench is heavy on purpose. Furniture that doesn’t relocate itself during a wind storm turns out to be a feature, not a flaw.
Where the Skis Come From, and What We Won’t Pretend
The skis arrive from shop trade-in piles, from garage cleanouts, from people who finally admitted the 205s in the rafters are never going back on a car. Some come from ski patrol. Some come from a divorce. We don’t ask. What matters is that they were ridden, because a ski that never saw a mogul field has no story in it, and story is most of what you’re buying.
Quantities surprise people. A single Adirondack ski chair takes four to five pairs of skis, so a matched set of two runs eight to ten pairs. A bench, being 62 inches of seat back instead of 20, goes through more than a chair does. If you’d rather work in snowboards, a snowboard chair needs at least three boards, though a single snowboard makes a fine coffee table or a low bench on its own. Hockey sticks run twelve to fifteen per chair. A golf club chair takes one full set, eleven or twelve clubs, which is why people so often build one out of Dad’s clubs after he stops playing.
Here’s the part where we’re going to be blunt, because the internet is full of nonsense on this point. Most ski lift benches and porch swings, ours included, are handcrafted replicas. They are built to look and sit like the real thing, and they’re built better than the real thing, because a lift chair was engineered to hang from a cable in February, not to be comfortable. When a piece genuinely came off a mountain, the product name says so. We’re not going to hand you a romantic origin story about a chair that came out of a shop in Colorado Springs last month. You’d figure it out eventually, and then you’d never trust anything else we said.
Browse the full range over in ski benches and you’ll see the spread, from single snowboard coffee tables to full Adirondack ski benches with a mural across the back. The low single board pieces also sit in ski and snowboard tables, since a lot of them work as either a bench or a coffee table depending on which room they end up in. Same shop, same base construction, very different price points.
Why a Mural Reads Better on a Bench Than on a Chair
Paint a mountain range on a chair back and you’ve got roughly 20 inches of ridgeline to work with. That’s two triangles and a suggestion. Paint the same range across a bench and you have 62 inches, which is enough room for the range to actually look like a range, with a foreground, a treeline, a shoulder coming down out of the frame and a sky that has somewhere to go. This is the entire argument for putting the mural on a bench. The Pikes Peak Sunset Mural Bench with Moose at $1,441 is the one people stop on most often, and it lands under the $1,591 Colorado Mountain build if you want the painted version for less.
Murals are hand painted in exterior oils, brush in hand, over a painted background. That means the sunset on yours will not be identical to the one in the photo, in the same way two of any painter’s canvases are never identical. Most people find that’s the point. Tell us the range you want, or send a photo of the view off your own deck and we’ll paint that instead. Custom paint work can carry an additional fee depending on complexity, and we’ll quote it before anything gets started.
One thing worth clearing up because it comes up on nearly every business call. A logo is never painted. Hand painting a corporate mark freehand gets you something that’s 96 percent right, and 96 percent right on a logo looks wrong to everybody who knows the brand. So logos go on as a logo decal floated onto a painted background, with aluminum and plastic appliques available as alternatives when you want something with more physical presence. The painted background can be anything you like, a mountain range, a color field, your brand palette. Branded pricing depends on the mark, the quantity and the substrate, so that gets quoted on a call rather than guessed at in a blog post.
Is a mural necessary? No. Plenty of buyers want the skis left unpainted so the original graphics do all the talking, and there’s something honest about a bench that’s just twenty years of ski manufacturing history lined up in a row. But if the bench is the piece that sets the tone for the whole porch, the mural is how it does that job.
Who Buys One of These, and Why They Come Back
The buyer profile is less predictable than you’d think. Yes, there are lifelong skiers who learned on straight skis and want the wall of graphics facing the driveway. But a solid share of orders come from people who have never clicked into a binding and simply liked the look of a bench made from something that used to be something else.
Cabin owners are a big group, because a cabin sits empty for four months and the furniture has to survive that unsupervised. Short term rental hosts buy them because a ski bench on the porch photographs well in a listing and gives guests something to mention in a review, which is a strange but real return on furniture. Couples buy one after eyeing our chairs for a year and deciding they’d rather sit next to each other than four feet apart. Ski shops and lodges buy them for entry seating, where people need somewhere to sit and wrestle boots.
Then there’s the group we’re most careful with. People who bring us a specific pair of skis. A father’s skis. A kid’s first pair, outgrown at twelve. The pair somebody rode the season before an injury ended it. Those orders go through the sentimental pieces side of the shop, and they get handled with more care and more phone calls than anything else we build, because there is no reordering a set of skis that only exists once. The piece those orders usually become is the Sentimental Ski Bench, built from your old skis or from ours, starting at $1,441.
Comfort matters more than the photos suggest. Our Adirondack seating is built to work for people from about 3 feet to 6 feet 10, with a 400 lb capacity, and the seat angle is the Adirondack angle for a reason. It puts you back far enough that you stop thinking about your posture. Two hours go by. You wonder where the evening went.
Where the Bench Belongs
A porch is the obvious answer and usually the right one. Front porch, facing the street, is where a ski bench does the most social work, because everybody walking a dog past your house is going to slow down and look at it. Back porch is where it does the most personal work. Coffee at 6 a.m. facing east, nobody talking.
Fire pit is the second most common home. The mural catches firelight differently than it catches daylight, the oranges come forward, and a 62 inch bench holds three people who are only pretending they aren’t cold. If you’re building out a fire pit area from nothing, a bench plus two chairs is the standard configuration, and it works because the bench anchors one side while the chairs stay movable for chasing the smoke.
Entryways and mudrooms deserve a mention, since a ski bench indoors is one of the more underrated moves in the catalog. Somewhere to sit and pull boots off, right where boots come off. If the wall is narrow, the 3-Ski Narrow Bench does that job at $399 and takes up almost no floor, and the Entryway Boot Bench and Coat Rack Combo at $895 adds the hooks so the coats stop ending up on the stair rail. Exterior oil paint doesn’t care that it’s indoors, and the piece reads as art on a wall that would otherwise hold a coat hook. Same goes for finished basements, ski condos and the odd commercial lobby. Have a look at what else works inside over in indoor decor and furniture.
One placement note that saves grief later. Give a bench like this a spot with at least a little overhead protection if you have it, not because it needs it, but because anything that stays a bit drier stays looking new a bit longer. Full sun, full weather, no cover? Still fine. It’ll just develop character faster.
Making It Yours Without Making It Complicated
Customization on a handcrafted piece is easier than customization on a mass produced one, which is backwards from what people expect. There’s no configurator with 14 dropdowns. There’s a phone call and a person writing on a notepad.
The most common requests are the simplest. Pick the colors you want. Or, more useful, tell us the colors you don’t want, because “anything but orange, my wife hates orange” is a far more actionable instruction than a color wheel. Ask for specific ski brands if you have a loyalty, and we’ll tell you honestly whether we have them in the pile right now or whether that adds time. Ask for the skis to be left unpainted so the factory graphics carry the whole piece. Ask for a custom front board with a family name, a mountain, a date.
Beyond skis, the same construction works in snowboards, cross-country skis, water skis, wakeboards, hockey sticks, golf clubs and repurposed oak wine barrel staves. Worth knowing on the chair side: a rocker conversion runs $75 more, done on repurposed oak wine barrel slats, and it turns a static chair into the one everybody fights over. If you’re pairing chairs to a bench, that’s an upgrade worth the seventy five bucks.
The one thing we’ll push back on is over-designing. We’ve watched people specify a bench so tightly that it stopped looking like a ski bench and started looking like a committee decision. The pieces that land best usually involve one strong idea, the range behind your house, one brand of ski, one color story, executed cleanly. Say the idea out loud on the phone and we’ll tell you if it’ll work.
Four Seasons on a Porch, and the Maintenance You Won’t Do
Let’s be realistic about maintenance, because everybody promises they’ll oil the teak twice a year and almost nobody does. A ski bench is built for the person who won’t. High quality exterior oil paint over a Douglas Fir base, ski bases that were literally engineered to sit in snow, and hardware chosen for weather. It’s weatherproof, and it’s meant to be left out.
Spring: hose it off, wipe the seat, check that nothing worked loose over winter. Summer: UV is the real enemy of any painted finish, and the darker mural colors will soften slightly over years of direct high altitude sun. That’s a decade-scale change, not a season-scale one. Fall: pine needles wedge into the gaps between skis, and a shop vacuum or a leaf blower clears them in about a minute. Winter: leave it. Snow load is not a problem, a bench with 400 lb capacity is not going to notice, and there’s a specific pleasure in shoveling out a bench you can then sit on with a beer.
If you want it to look showroom new indefinitely, throw a cover on it during the worst of the winter and touch up any deep scratch with exterior paint. If you’d rather it age like a good pair of boots, do nothing at all. Both are legitimate. We’ve seen ten year old benches from this shop that look like they were delivered last month, and we’ve seen ten year old benches that look like they’ve been sat on by four thousand people, which they have.
The 3 year hassle free warranty covers the things that shouldn’t happen. Fading you disagree with, a joint that loosens, hardware that fails. Call us. We’re not going to make you photograph a receipt from 2023 at a specific angle.
Gifting One, and How Ordering Actually Works
A bench is a big gift, which is exactly why it works for the milestones where a bottle of something feels thin. Retirements. A fiftieth anniversary. A cabin somebody finally closed on after eleven years of talking about it. A memorial piece built from a person’s own skis, which is the heaviest and most meaningful thing this shop does. If a bench is more than the occasion calls for, the ski gifts for him and her collection is sorted by budget and starts a long way below a bench, and gifts made in Colorado is the page to send someone who moved away from the mountains and has not stopped talking about them.
Timing is the thing to plan around. Made to order runs two to four weeks in normal conditions, longer heading into the holidays, and custom mural work adds to that. Some pieces are ready to ship right now with no wait, and if your date is fixed, ask about those first rather than falling in love with a two week build eight days before the party. If you’re cutting it close, we’ve done gift announcements before, a printed photo of the piece with a delivery date, and nobody has ever been disappointed by that.
On logistics: most chairs ship free to the lower 48, we do local delivery across Colorado, and we ship nationwide within the lower 48. Larger benches and full sets have their own freight considerations, which is another thing better handled on a call than guessed at online. Give us the zip code and we’ll be straight with you about cost and timing.
Ordering itself is not a maze. Pick the piece, tell us your colors and any requests, and we build it. If you’re not sure whether you want a bench, a bench with two chairs, or a bench and a table, call and describe your space out loud. We’ve done this thousands of times and we’ll usually talk you into spending less than you planned, because a piece that fits the space beats a piece that fills it.
Frequently Asked Questions
How many skis go into a handcrafted ski bench?
More than go into a chair. One Adirondack ski chair takes four to five pairs of skis, and a matched set of two chairs takes eight to ten pairs, so a 62 inch bench with a full seat back consumes a good deal more than that. If you’re supplying your own skis, call first and we’ll tell you exactly how many pairs your project needs.
Can I use my own old skis?
Yes, and it’s one of the most requested builds in the shop. Ship them or drop them off, and we’ll build the bench around them. Because a specific pair of skis cannot be replaced if something goes wrong, these orders get extra care and a few more phone calls than a standard build.
Will a ski bench survive being left outside all winter?
Yes. It’s built from a Douglas Fir base finished in high quality exterior oil paint, with ski bases that were designed to live in snow, and it’s rated to 400 lb capacity. Rinse it off in spring and clear the pine needles out of the gaps in fall, and that’s genuinely the whole maintenance routine.
Can you put our company logo on a bench?
We can, but not with a paintbrush. A logo goes on as a logo decal floated onto a hand painted background, with aluminum and plastic appliques available when you want more physical presence. Branded pricing depends on the mark and the quantity, so that gets quoted on a call at 303.775.7273.
How long does a handcrafted ski bench take to arrive?
Made to order pieces typically run two to four weeks before they ship, and custom mural work can add to that. Some pieces are ready to ship immediately with no wait, so if you’re working against a fixed date, ask about those first.
If you’ve got a porch that deserves better than what’s on it, call the shop at 303.775.7273 and describe the space. We’ll tell you whether the Colorado Mountain Adirondack Ski Bench is the right piece or whether something else in ski benches fits better, and we’ll be honest even when the honest answer costs us money. Built in Manitou Springs, Colorado, delivered across the state, shipped nationwide to the lower 48.
