A few months back I was at my parents and my mother mentioned that the table she used in the garden for potting plants and such like was getting a bit rotten so I offered to make a replacement.
I got some measurements of what they wanted and had a bunch of wood laying around that I wasn’t using. Infact the bulk of it was made from scaffolding planks I’d got over a year previous and had been sat in the garden since then. Thankfully this was going to be a functional piece of furniture for the garden and didn’t have to look too pretty, which is a good job because of the state of the planks. They were filthy and covered in dirt. I gave them a first pass with a rag which didn’t really do much, and then decided my random orbital sander was a better option to get them clean!
The rest was made from left over treated timber I’d used for making planters years ago which meant that as far as I was concerned it was all free!
I did take it as an opportunity to practice half lap joints on the main table top using the mitre saw and its depth stop. However the wood wasn’t the best and a bit warped so after doing the top like that, the rest got much simpler joints!
It isn’t going to win any awards, but its definitely solid and should last plenty of years to come. Not only that but it used up a load of wood that had been cluttering up my workshop and the garden for years. Of course barely a week after finishing this I had another project to do which involved ordering more wood in, but at least for those two weeks there was more room to manoeuvre in the workshop than usual.
And of course, brownie points with the parents is never a bad thing. Just in case we need dog sitters or something.
