Wednesday, July 10, 2013

Outdoor Table With Benches


So, now that we have this amazing deck, we needed appropriate seating.  We do have 2 deck chairs and 2 deck ottomans (that the dogs chewed and destroyed), but 2 chairs isn't enough for a cookout!  My original plans for the deck included a built in seating area, but we ran out of lumber. While we do plan on adding that later on, we still needed seating for the time being.  I perused walmart.com, amazon, and craigslist, but I wasn't really seeing anything that I really wanted.

When we moved into this house, we found an old door in the rafters of the shed.  Immediately I wanted to do 23048972304710938412 things with it. :)  It was too small to be a king size headboard, I couldn't figure out where I would put it as a bookshelf...and then it hit me!  A picnic table!

My original plan was to purchase legs from Lowes (In case you didn't know, I hate Home Depot and will always and forever go to Lowes for my home improvement needs), but they're in the neighborhood of $20/leg.  Not what I wanted to spend.  Then I searched Pinterest for ideas on using pallets (we have several in the back yard just waiting to be turned into magnificent things).  What I was seeing looked clunky.  I had finally settle on purchasing lumber to make it into a "real" picnic table.  At least if I was going to be purchasing something, I would get seats out of it too.

 Then, I found this picture...



Since having gotten all this wood from the neighbor, our scrap pile has grown quite a bit! Guess what?  We had a door just waiting to be turned into a table, some leftover 2x8s and 2x4s from the deck and 4x4 posts from the fence. 

A few links in, I finally found a tutorial for that table...but it required a lot of things we didn't have.  So, we just did our own thing using that look as our inspiration.


The one thing we did use from the tutorial was the table height.  Being that we're not bonified carpenters, we weren't sure what the standard height for a table was.  We used the 96inches as our starting point and subtracted from there to get our piece heights.


Being that it is an old door, and that we had extra lumber, we added a 2x8 on each side.  Now there is plenty of room to eat, drink, and be merry!

Last, but not least, we still needed seating.  I wanted benches because you can fit more people on a bench...if you really want/need to.  Plus, they're easy to move if we want to congregate near the fire pit.


They were really simple, but I LOVE the way they turned out!  The table is a nice solid piece, and the benches feel really sturdy.

We haven't done any sealing kind of coat yet, but I think we will soon.

A friend of mine asked me for a tutorial, but I didn't take pictures as we went.  Shortly after posting this picture on facebook, I got a message from a friend of a friend asking me to make her one!  We're in the process of pricing things right now, but if/when we build her a set, I will definitely do a tutorial!

So, what do you think?

xoxo,
Linda



3 comments:

  1. Linda, this is fantastic!! I am in awe of your creativity and ability to follow through with the end product looking even better than the goal. Girlfriend, when I typically try to do something like that I am so far off half way through I completely give up. This is beautiful and I love that you and the hubby worked on it together :) You'll certainly treasure this piece for years to come!

    <3 Abbe

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