Thread by @jburnmurdoch

Brief interlude from Covid content today

I recently decided work wasn't busy enough (lol) and set out to build a garden table from scratch. Easily one of the most rewarding things I've done.

Here's a step-by-step, starting with ~60m of wood arriving, too big to bring indoors 😅

So the race was on to cut the wood small enough to bring inside before any rain.

Lots of sawing, some with a circular saw until neighbours complained (not unreasonably), and then hand-saw for the rest.

Super useful tool here for calculating cuts: kurraglenindustries.com.au/linear-cutting…

With everything cut to size, next step was sanding down all edges to make sure nobody would sit on a splinter.

Unfortunately the electric sander also proved unpopular with neighbours, so I hand-sanded 40-odd planks 😅

Then it was a case of waiting for optimal painting weather.

The weather arrived, so next up was waterproofing all of the table-top slats.

The shorter, squatter pieces for table legs etc were a bit trickier: with time at a premium, how do you paint all six faces of a block of wood in one go?

Turns out there's a genius method: paint one face, then rest on the ends of a few screws, then paint the other 5. All done 🙌

So, everything painted, dried and ready to assemble 😀

Next up, power drill time, and everything starts to look a little less like a pile of wood and more like something that might become a table

Now with added legs:

And then table-topping time. Turns out a set of cutlery was perfect for spacing out the slats 😅

Table top secured:

Et voila. A pretty sick garden table and benches, if I say so myself. Here's to a summer of working, eating and drinking outdoors

Credits:

Table design, instructions and video: homemade-modern.com/ep101-diy-outd…

Circular saw: borrowed from @mikederismith

Physical and emotional support: @RossalynWarren