DIY Easy Outdoor Table How to Build an Outdoor Table Counter Bar Table Woodworking Project

Alright, welcome back to the channel and another project. It's late June already and we still don't have any outdoor furniture. We were hoping to reuse the stuff that we had last year, make it last for another year or two, and unfortunately this spring when we pulled it out it kind of bit the dust. My wife and I have so far been unable to find something that we could both agree upon or like in a price range that we like, so I figured I'd build something. So that's what we're going to do today. I'm going to try to build a pretty big table, build it for as cheap as possible and as fast as possible because we're almost already in July. So hope you stick around and see what I came up with. Alright this is what I came up with and it's a pretty simple design. We're going to build this using all nominal size lumber that you can find at any big box store. Overall the dimensions are going to be 40 inches wide, eight and a half feet long, and then it's going to be 36 inches tall just like a normal countertop. And I love the big six by six legs that we're going to be using for this thing. First step is to build the tabletop. In total it's going to be made out of four 2x10s and two 2x8s. First step for me is to run all of these through the planer so that they're the same exact width and I'm going to plane these down to one and a quarter inches. Then I'm going to cut the 2x10s down to eight and a half inches wide and I'm going to cut down the 2x8s to six inches wide. This is what's going to give me that 40 inch width table and then I'm going to have two pieces to put on either end. Then the last thing I'm going to do is orient the boards the way that I'm going to glue them up for the table and I'm going to use opposite grain patterns so that if they do warp or move a little bit they won't all be in the same direction. Then after flipping the boards over so I'm working on the bottom, I'm going to mark out every foot. And what I'm doing is every foot I'm going to drill a hole for a pocket hole screw, kreg jig screws. And the reason I'm doing this is I'm using a mechanical fastener rather than something like a biscuit or a dowel because I don't have a biscuit cutter. So I really like these these kreg jig screws. They hold really tight with the combination of glue. I think this top should be really really strong. So that's the next step is to glue everything together and I'm using Titebond 3. It's worked really well for me in the past and it's rated for outdoors. While the glue is drying on the tabletop we can go ahead and start building the table frame. In total the table frame is made out of two 6x6's and five 2x4's. The first step for me is to go ahead and start planing down all of this lumber. The 6x6's get planed down to five and a half inches wide in both directions and then the 2x4's get planed down to about an inch and a quarter wide. Then I take the 2x4's that are going to be used for the rails and I rip them to three and a quarter. Some people can go down to three and an eighth or three. The advantage there is you get a little bit more leg room underneath the table when you're using it. Then the last step is to cut everything to length. Then each rail is pre-drilled for pocket hole screws, two in each side. When I assembled these I used the blue kreg jig screws because they're rated for outdoors. Also when putting the rails on I offset them from the outside of the legs by half of an inch just to create a little bit of an offset and a little bit of character. Then after all the braces are installed and to strengthen up this corner where this big leg is I created this 45 degree angle piece and screwed it into the brace on either side. This piece is going to help triangulate this corner and really lock those braces to this leg and really support that huge heavy leg. I drilled a hole straight through the 2x4 brace into the leg and then I used a four inch lag screw and washer to really tighten that thing on there. Then after that I went ahead and installed all my other braces that go horizontally in the inside of the table. Two right in the center that are 12 inches apart from each other and then the other ones are roughly 18 inches apart from each other. Just something to help further support the top of the table. Then after the glue was dry I came back and chipped away any of the big pieces and then I went at it with a belt sander. I had 40 grit sandpaper in my belt sander and I found out pretty quick that that rips up this soft pine really really quick. Did a great job of getting any minor imperfections in between joints level but those big scratches were hard to get out. I did go over it with an orbital sander with 120 grit paper but it took a lot of work to try to get those scratches out of there. To be honest I didn't get all of them out there but it did kind of create this cool kind of rustic look if that's what you're trying to go for. After everything was pretty level then I could take this kreg track saw and make the cut on either end to make a nice sharp clean cut. Man this thing makes a clean cut and I really like this saw. Then yet again with more pocket screws I installed the end pieces. Those are those two by eights that I cut down they're six inches wide now and I screwed these on either end and I really think these are going to keep the other boards from moving up and down too much. Then we attach the top of the table to the frame and yet again I'm using more pocket hole screws so I pre-drilled all of these then put the top of the table on put a ton of weight on it and clamped it down so it wasn't going anywhere. I installed 56 kreg jig screws to screw the top down to the base and on each one of these rails there is a kreg jig screw that screws into every board in the top of the table. So every board in the table essentially is screwed into the base of the table in about four or five different locations. Now that the end wing pieces are put on and everything's attached the way that it should be I went over it and sanded it again. I went over it with 120 grit sandpaper again just to try to make this thing look as good as possible. Then the next step for me was to get rid of the sharp corner on the edge of the table. I went with a 45 degree chamfer bit on my router. For this type of table I think a chamfer was better than a round over because there's so many big sharp edges and then I did that same process to the bottom of the legs and I did this to soften the edge of those legs so that if they're not sitting on the ground 100% flat you're not going to be able to tell. It kind of creates a shadow effect. Then I sanded the table off for a third time. This time I went over it with a 220 grit sandpaper which was probably a little bit overkill for this type of table and like I said earlier I didn't get all of the major scratches near the joints out that I put in it with the belt sander but I really did kind of like the the rustic look that it had but at this point this table is super smooth. Then I needed to get all the dust off the table because we don't want any of that in the finish. I used an air compressor and hose to blow off most of the dust that I could and then used a tack cloth to get everything else off. All right now on to the most important part of the project and probably the part that I don't like the most, the finishing stage. For this I'm using poly shades which is polyurethane and stain all-in-one. I'll be honest with you I don't know if this is the best product for this scenario but I know my wife really likes this color already so why mess with a good thing? Then I'm going to put a coating of actually a few coats of this spar urethane over top of it to make it weather resistant. All right so here's what the table looks like after two coats of just the poly shades. You can see it's not a real high gloss finish yet but we really have that brown color that I was looking for. Then I went ahead and put on four coats of the spar urethane. I only waited four hours in between each coat like it said to do on the back of the can. I made sure that I sanded the table every time with a 220 grit sandpaper and then removed all the dust with a tack cloth. Once the finish was complete the last thing that I did was I pulled off the wings on either side of the table. I put coats of not only the polyurethane but also the spar urethane on the ends of all of the boards because that's going to be the area where water is going to be sucked in the most and then I also did the same to the edge of the wing as well. Once I knew the diameter of the umbrella I went ahead and drilled a hole in the center of the table. I do have the painter's tape on there to help protect the finish so that it won't chip up as much and then yet again inside the hole I applied a few coats of both finishes. Alright so it's about two weeks later now and we've really gotten to use this table. We've had a bunch of people over and we've really got to use it and see how it works and minus a few little things it's going pretty well. Obviously the big thing that you probably saw was the umbrella broke so I'm working on that trying to get with the company and see how I can fix that and repair that. I don't think that's too bad and that's probably my fault not the the maker of the umbrella. It was kind of windy and a big gust came by and broke that one piece but so hopefully we get that resolved. The other minor issue that we had was I think I didn't get one of my glue joints tight enough together and a little crack opened up and a little bit of water got into it and it swelled a little bit but I think we took care of that. I put a little epoxy in it and then put another coating of spar urethane over top of it so I think we're going to be okay there but other than that table's holding up really well. My wife and I really love the size of this it's about 40 inches wide eight and a half feet long and then it's countertop height and that was the big thing for us. We wanted seating for eight because every time we have people over it seems like we have five people or six people and it doesn't fit you know they wouldn't fit around our four-person table. There was always odd people out or something like this. With an eight-person table we have plenty of room for everybody. You can put all kinds of stuff on the table and you don't have any problems with with not having enough room. The other thing is we made it a countertop height table so we didn't want a full bar height table. This is 36 inches tall just like your countertops would be in most people's kitchens and we went with that height because it was a nice medium in between the two sit up a little bit higher. We have the two golden retrievers that maybe you've seen in some of my other videos and they love to rest their head on a normal patio furniture table so this is just high enough where they can't get their heads up here and it makes for a better eating experience for everybody here. The chairs that we got we found on Wayfair so these were yet again the the name of the game for this project was budget and the chairs that we went with were right around a hundred dollars each which a hundred dollars per chair for eight chairs is still a decent amount of money but when you start looking at patio furniture and what things cost that was about the best we could do for what we wanted to spend unless I wanted to build something but building one chair would have been fine two chairs okay eight chairs I really wasn't wanting to take on that project. Overall the table took about two days to actually build it took me closer to a week to apply all the finish and I'm really happy with it. So if you enjoy this video and you kind of like the table please give it a like if you like these type of projects and the stuff that I'm doing here I'd consider subscribing but other than that I hope to see you guys on another video.