Hello again!
I’m back with a great Craft Wednesday! Just in time for Memorial Day, too! Last week I stumbled on this How to Build a Patio Dining Table post from How To Nest For Less, and it seemed like the perfect solution for me. I had been looking for an affordable table for our deck for weeks and couldn’t find anything I wanted. Not to mention it was a project the hubs and I could do together. How perfect! The actual plans for the table came from Ana White, a fantastic website with over 1000 free building plans.
I’ve got a lot of pictures for this post, so hang in there with me.
After convincing the hubs that this was a perfect solution, we went off to the hardware store. Here’s all the stuff I bought that wasn’t the actual wood.
And here’s most of the wood after the hubs cut it to size. This took him no more than 1/2 an hour.
Once they were cut, we sanded all the boards down. At that point it was getting late, so the next step had to wait until the next day, which turned out to be the longest part of the whole project. Throughout the next day I stained all of the tabletop boards and legs with Minwax Woodrose white tint stain. It took longer than I expected due the pre-stain step, so I skipped staining and just sealed the support and apron boards so we could move on more quickly.
Here are two of the tabletop boards. The left has been stained, and the right has been stained and sealed. The sealant did alter the color of the stain a bit, but I liked the end result.
Now, we’ve bounced into another day, and I had to finish sealing the stained boards while the hubs built the tabletop supports. Here it is laid out on the deck.
By this time I was finished sealing, so I helped attached the outer side aprons.
Then it was time to attach all 17 tabletop boards! We laid them out how we wanted them, alternating the wood grain direction to help with mitigate any future warping, then stacked them on the end so we wouldn’t get the order mixed up.
This part took us a total of three hours. If I haven’t mentioned it yet, we are novices, so we spent most of that time checking and re-checking.
Tabletop finally done!
I was so excited at this point! We had almost finished the table, and I was ridiculously proud of us. The only alteration we made to the plans came next, when we attached the legs. The hubs decided to bolt them on so we could take them off if we ever needed to transport the table. I added another layer of sealant after this to finish off the table.
All in all, this project took us three days start to finish, from Thursday evening to Saturday afternoon. It was completely worth it, and was a great project for us to do together. We are already considering making the matching bench.
That’s all for this Craft Wednesday! See you Friday!
Messy Counters and Floured Paperbacks 