Helping a neighbor. (Sort of)
Posted: Mon Jul 08, 2013 11:02 pm
For the last twenty years I have had a little side hobby building picnic tables. These are your run of the mill six footers with attached seats. This year my neighbor who runs the little store on the corner suggested I put a couple on his lot to generate business (I’m retired, I don’t want to make this a business). So I said sure, why not. Thursday he called and said a customer wanted to know if I would build two benches to replace the ones she had with her table. I’m not really into that, but since Tony has helped me out in the past I decided to help him. I called the lady and she said her dad built her table twenty years ago and now the benches were rotting away.
She lived a couple miles down the road so I said I would stop down to take a look. They were your run of the mill benches so I said I would take one home and work up a price. I called the next day with the price and she said she decided to replace the table also. So I went back too her house and loaded the table. She said she wanted an additional 2x6 added to the top to make it wider. This thing is eight foot long so I knew I was in for some heavy moving when this baby was done.
As simple as these are, I have never built one so I measured up everything, recalculated the angles on the legs due to the additional width and threw a price at her. She said “Do it”. Deep inside I was hoping for a no go. So yesterday morning I ran over to Home Depot, loaded everything and commenced working on this little project. It took a bit longer than I planned since I never did one but it wasn’t too bad once I got going.
I dropped it off tonight. She was happy, her husband was happy and their dog barked at me. Either he was happy too or he smelled my border collies scent on me. The husband said to get ready for some more business because he come from a family of nine kids and several of his brothers have wanted new tables also. I really, really didn’t want this right now.
The whole thing was pretty much straight forward. I just used one of the old legs on the bench as a template
for the new ones. I had to play around with the table legs since it was being altered a bit from the old one.
Once completed, everything got a good sanding to remove mill stampings, pencil marks and such.
You can't see it in the photo, but there is a brace running from the X in the legs to the bottom side of the table top.
It turned out better than I thought it would. If I have more time I would probably do a couple more for others.
She lived a couple miles down the road so I said I would stop down to take a look. They were your run of the mill benches so I said I would take one home and work up a price. I called the next day with the price and she said she decided to replace the table also. So I went back too her house and loaded the table. She said she wanted an additional 2x6 added to the top to make it wider. This thing is eight foot long so I knew I was in for some heavy moving when this baby was done.
As simple as these are, I have never built one so I measured up everything, recalculated the angles on the legs due to the additional width and threw a price at her. She said “Do it”. Deep inside I was hoping for a no go. So yesterday morning I ran over to Home Depot, loaded everything and commenced working on this little project. It took a bit longer than I planned since I never did one but it wasn’t too bad once I got going.
I dropped it off tonight. She was happy, her husband was happy and their dog barked at me. Either he was happy too or he smelled my border collies scent on me. The husband said to get ready for some more business because he come from a family of nine kids and several of his brothers have wanted new tables also. I really, really didn’t want this right now.
The whole thing was pretty much straight forward. I just used one of the old legs on the bench as a template
for the new ones. I had to play around with the table legs since it was being altered a bit from the old one.
Once completed, everything got a good sanding to remove mill stampings, pencil marks and such.
You can't see it in the photo, but there is a brace running from the X in the legs to the bottom side of the table top.
It turned out better than I thought it would. If I have more time I would probably do a couple more for others.