Step by Step Patio Table Plans - With Built-In Coolers!

16,000 woodworking plans inside...(2 days left) 

I just discovered this and suggest you see this immediately... 

BHC 14 INEXPENSIVE TREE STAND PDF Plans build your own tree stand Woodworking Download.

Click Here To Download

We are freaking out (like - YOU HAVE NO IDEA!!) because our patio table is being featured over at Remodelaholic today!  Follow the link below to find a post detailing precisely how we build our patio tables with ice chests.  You'll find step by step instructions with more pictures than you can possibly imagine.  You can build this, guys, it isn't that hard!  Please go check it out and let us know what you think!

Matching bench plans can be found here:

If you like this project, follow us on Facebook to see what else we're up to!

How (Not) To Refresh Your Outdoor Patio Furniture

16,000 woodworking plans inside...(2 days left) 

I just discovered this and suggest you see this immediately... 

BHC 14 INEXPENSIVE TREE STAND PDF Plans build your own tree stand Woodworking Download.

Click Here To Download

So I already alluded to the fact, last week, that we were working on staining our patio furniture.  Oh, how I wish it was just that simple.  You see, had it not been for one fatal flaw I made, fixing up our patio furniture would have only been an afternoon type job.  Instead, it turned into an entire weekend long torture fest.  This is a good time to mention the benefits of having patio furniture made out of real wood - the useful life you can get out of it is incredible when you have the ability to sand it down whenever it begins to show wear.  Metal sets are great too, with a clean coat of spray paint every few years.

This all began as I was looking at our patio table and chairs a few weeks ago.  They hadn't had a fresh coat of sealer in about two years and as cedar ages, it takes on a weathered gray color.

These are the chairs we have that also could use a little sprucing up - see how the finish is coming off the fronts of the chairs.

So I badgered Brent and the fam into going down to the hardware store to get some stain...figuring I would have this project knocked out by evening.   I picked up three products.  

Deck Wash

Brown Stain/Sealer for the Patio Table

      

Turquoise Stain for the Patio Chairs - hint # 1 that this was a bad idea.

      

To get started, clean any dust off of your furniture - I used the air compressor hose to blow all of the debris out of the cracks.

I transferred some of the deck wash into an old plastic container and brushed a coat over the entire table and chair set.

 Using a hose, rinse the product off completely.  No scrubbing required - unless you have some super dirty furniture!

 After the furniture is completely dry, you will likely need to do a little sanding because all of that moisture makes the wood look a little fuzzy.  An orbital sander loaded with 120 grit paper did the trick for us.  Blow the sanding dust off and you're ready to start applying the stain.  This particular product I'm using is a stain and sealer in one, so there won't be any need for a top coat.

 After I was done with the table, I was excited to move onto the chairs and this supposedly awesome blue stain I had picked out.  I don't know what I was expecting when I opened the can, but it wasn't this.  Now would have been a good time to do a test patch to see if I was going to get the results I desired - but....I didn't.  I decided to just throw a coat on the chair and deal with the consequences.  Not good guys....not good.

Crayola hasn't even invented this color.  It ended up being a muted blue brown yellow tone, because the blue stain is considered semi-transparent, it allows the wood grain to show through, except in my case, the chairs were sort of yellow brown from the old sealer which created this obvious disaster.

 Then I hit a stopping point because the following day, this happened:

After the snow melted, I not-surprisingly made mistake number 2.  I decided that maybe the chair just needed a second coat of stain and maybe that would bring out more of the blue and less of the brown/yellow.  At this point, I was either going to be sanding it all down or painting over the top anyways, so might as well just add more stain!  Well, the mossy green only turned a darker shade of mossy green.  As I type this, I'm slapping my forehead because, DUH!!!  Big surprise that it only got darker green.  Dangit!

 The other downside here is that I have an entire gallon of blue stain - I've been racking my brain trying to figure out what kinds of projects I can use it on.  And I can't think of many...not many at all.

Now I had to decide, prime and paint the chairs or sand them down and stain them a different color.  I searched all over Pinterest for some inspiring photos of painted patio furniture but honestly, the only painted chairs I could find were the adirondack style chairs.

I finally decided that there must be a reason people stain outdoor chairs instead of painting them, so with my tail between my legs, I asked Brent if he would help me get them all sanded down.  And as always, with a smile, he said he'd love to.  Luckily, I had only stained one of the chairs green but the others needed to come down to bare wood so the final stain would look even on all of them.

Between the two of us, it look us about 12 labor hours to get 2 chairs, one love seat and two little side tables sanded.  We went through more 80 and 120 grit sandpaper than I could count.

Brent mostly used the orbital sander to get the majority of green stain off while I used a hand sander to get into the tight spots.

After 2 hours of sanding by hand, and complaining the entire time, I realized we had a multi-tool with a sanding attachment.  SAVED MY LIFE!!  It quickly got into all the hard to reach areas (do I sound like a toothbrush commercial?).  Since there were so many nooks and crannies, it still took quite a while to sand but at least the multi-tool made it a little easier on the arms.

After we had gotten as much stain off as we could reach, there were still some areas that needed attention, so we ended up taking apart the chairs to get into those spots.  Finally, ready for stain.  I put a thin, even coat on the chairs using the same product I had used on the patio table using a natural bristle brush.

 Here's a side by side - the one on the right has a fresh coat of stain.

And two weeks later, it was nice enough out to take some pictures!

 And finally, the best feature of our home are these double french doors from our dining room out to the patio.  We have these doors open as much as possible when the weather and humidity cooperate.

So refinishing our patio furniture wasn't difficult, just a big time and labor commitment.  Hard to believe that square patio table is 8 years old, built by my dad for Brent and I's one year wedding anniversary.  With the fresh coat of stain and sealer, it looks brand new.

The moral of this story is to be careful with your wood furniture.  If you feel like taking a risk and choosing a colored stain, try it in an inconspicuous spot FIRST before diving in.  Hopefully I can save someone from making the mistake I did and the hours and hours it took to correct it!

From Trash to Two-Tone Treasure

16,000 woodworking plans inside...(2 days left) 

I just discovered this and suggest you see this immediately... 

BHC 14 INEXPENSIVE TREE STAND PDF Plans build your own tree stand Woodworking Download.

Click Here To Download

Many moons ago, October to be exact, Brent and I had the official pleasure of loading this sweet treat into our van.  A friend had a wall full of built in cabinetry that needed to be removed and this desk was part of that cabinetry.  I knew we could do something with it to give it some more life, I just wasn't sure when we were going to have the time.  For 4 months, it sat in our laundry room, acting as a craft table and assembly station for other projects.

I was really stuck on how to finish this desk.  Should it be for a boy or a girl - should it be painted or stained?  Combing through Pinterest for inspiration, I settled on a gender neutral color for the base and the top would be stained.  The top had been neglected...by me.  You can see pink paint, stain and scratches all over it.

Using an orbital sander, I sanded off the paint.  Note to self...next time, Heidi, don't sand things in the house.  Dust.  Everywhere.  It's too darn cold to go outside though, so where in the heck am I supposed to get any work done??!!  We just bought a wood burning stove for our workshop but I'm afraid it will be spring until we have time to install it.

Sanding the paint off was easy but the scratch marks I had put in while cutting through some screen material were deep wounds.  Deep emotional wounds.  Using wood filler and a putty knife, I filled all of the scratches.

While that was drying, the drawers came out to be primed.  

It was at this point that I decided to completely nix the drawer above the chair area.  The drawer was so deep, like heighthwise, that you would have to have an unnaturally low chair so your legs could fit underneath the drawer.  Then you would end up sitting so low at the desk that the desktop would be at your chest.  So I removed the hardware for that drawer completely.

I made Owen sit on the stool to demonstrate how that top drawer was going to be too big.  He is only 4 years old and skinny as a rail - and his little thighs are just barely going to squeeze in there.  Oh yeah, and the desk is even elevated another 3/4 of an inch because it is up on some supports for painting, so Owen would have had even LESS clearance!

Everything got a coat of primer.

Here's my top in all of it's sanded glory (that's actually not the first time I've said that!).

A coat of walnut stain later and we have this.  FAIL FAIL FAIL!  You can't see it very well in the photo, but the parts where I used wood filler were super obvious and weren't covered up by the stain as I had hoped.  So then I did what any woman would do - I added another layer to try and cover it up.  And by layer, I mean dark coffee glaze.

Another FAIL!  It ended up looking black.  And sparkly.  And it still just looked like a piece of plywood, not the shiny finished wood top I was hoping for.  After whining to Brent for a bit and convincing him the project was ruined and just a big waste of time, he told me he could make a new custom top for it.  Thanks sweetheart!

I moved onto painting in the mean time.  There was a quart of flat paint that I had gotten for FREE from Ace Hardware last fall when testing colors for our workshop.  Suprise - another shade of turquoise!

Brent came home with the new top he had made, it fit right over the top of the old one and gets screwed to the desk from below so you don't see any screw holes.

After a coat of stain...

I put two coats of this poly on the wood top and used the sheep's wool pad next to it to apply the poly.

Now we move onto the stool that was to go with the desk.  This stool showed up at our house one day and I honestly have no idea where it came from.

I'm not super smart, which I can prove if you would have been at parent-teacher conferences when I told Emma's teacher that 11 minus 7 equals 5.  But I am smart enough to know that these points on the four corners of the stool couldn't stay.

Brent took them off with a saws-all.

The existing on the stool could only be described as "shiny".  A lot of high gloss laquer went on that thing!  And I was determined to take it off.  I sanded most of it with the orbital sander and used a palm sander for the rest.  Then I stained it and added some poly to match the desk top.

Here are the final project pictures:

The funny part about this desk is that neither of my children can use it!  Emma already has a beautiful desk that my dad built for me and Owen's bedroom is too tiny to fit a desk.  It would be a great desk for an adult, I sat at it comfortably, and it would hold a laptop perfectly.  For fun, I asked Brent to sit at it - he fit, but he looked like a giant!
Since our children don't have a use for it, we have a special little friend that can hopefully get some use out of it for a few years - and she is most likely becoming a big sister today!!!