DIY Farmhouse Outdoor Table (With Free Plans)

We got married last year in a tiny mountain town in Georgia. Thirty-five of our friends and family came from all over – across the country and across the world – to celebrate with us at the coolest venue where everyone could stay in modern farmhouse-style cabins for a long weekend celebration. When vendors asked what our wedding ‘theme’ was, we told them we wanted an upscale house party vibe. In the end it was exactly that. We all had breakfast together the morning of the wedding, we got ready in the main farmhouse on site and after the ceremony among the trees we ate dinner along huge, 8-foot DIY farmhouse outdoor table like one big family.

Ever since then, we’ve wanted our own giant table for cookouts, games nights and happy hour beers, but we didn’t love the pricetag of a lot of options online. The lowest we found at the size and the style we liked was $700, and some went into the thousands.

Instead we gathered Pinterest inspiration pics, a whole lot of wood and poured literal blood and sweat into the finished product.

It took about $200 in materials, one weekend, and some quick math on the floor of the Home Depot lumber section, but our back patio is so next level it’s spurred a secondary list of projects we want to do to make the rest of the backyard as nice.

Here’s how we built our DIY farmhouse outdoor table:

On This Page

Tools & Materials

Wood list:

Note on wood: We bought kiln-dried pressure treated lumber because it’s going to be used outside. If you buy the green, wet-feeling pressure treated lumber (that isn’t kiln-dried) is a little cheaper but can’t be stained for a few weeks or months until it fully dries out. This is a personal preference but we wanted to be able to stain right away because we didn’t love the original wood color and are notorious for never finishing those tiny, last-minute things that would complete a project.

(7) 4x4s at 8 feet
(2) 2x4s at 8 feet
(6) 2x8s at 8 feet
(2) 2x10s at 8 feet

Tools:

Miter saw
4 5-inch wood screws
Wood stain – we got this deck stain and sealer in one in the color Canyon Brown (which we loved)
2.5-inch exterior wood screws
Kreg jig
2.5-inch pocket hole screws
Sander

(This list is assuming you already have everything in our Getting Started with DIY toolbox)

How We Did It

This project seems complicated, but really isn’t, it’s just A LOT of wood.

Because we both went to the store and had a baby in tow, we took two cars so we could keep her in one and haul the wood in the other. We don’t have a truck, just a small SUV but as long as we don’t buy anything longer than 8 feet we’re good to fit it into the back.

This project was the most amount of lumber we’ve ever needed for something we’ve built, even more than when we planked our bedroom wall.

Alex loaded in all the wood, big pieces on the bottom, and it perfectly fit in, but right as he was getting really sweaty, the baby started crying and we got hungry, he closed the back door and the very bottom piece of wood was juuuuuuusstttt covering the latch that would let it close the full way.

I peaced out real quick under the ruse of the fussy baby, and Alex, being the hero he is, UNLOADED THE WHOLE CAR and reloaded it because it was way too heavy to just shove in a little bit further to expose that latch.

Hot and Heavy, Literally

When we got home, we started with the obvious – cutting all the wood. It’s going to be much more efficient to get it all cut then assembled rather than cutting as you go for the different elements.

Because I’m a very visual person, I’ve drafted up this cut and assembly list and made a printable version to tick off as you go.

It was so hot the three days we worked on our table we had to keep taking breaks for water and sunscreen reapplication. It rained at some point every day we worked, so it was that hot, humid, get-out-of-the-shower-but-you’re-never-dry kind of Louisiana weather.

Being the dirty weasel I am, I also definitely ‘heard’ the baby crying more than she was during naptime so I could sneak a little airconditioning break.

It took probably two hours to get everything measured and cut, including the angle cuts for the legs which took forever because I made Alex do the ‘triangle math’ that I have never once in my life understood.

Cutting the X-shaped Legs

This seems intimidating, but bear with us! Even Alex was skeptical we could do these lap joint cuts, but I’d watched like three YouTube videos on it so I was about as expert as millennials come.

The idea of a lap joint is to make a notch opening halfway deep on each of the two pieces so they fit together like Lego and hold each other in place.

With your table legs, (the angle-cut 4×4 pieces) hold each set of two up as if they’re standing table legs criss-crossed and draw lines marking where they cross in the middle.

This is a little hard to explain, but take one of the legs and lay it out wherever you’re working and secure it down while you work with your circular saw.

Then, hold your circular saw blade up against the first line you drew to mark the outer edge of the criss-cross area (its official name). Clamp a piece of scrap wood on the outside of your saw’s guard, and repeat on the other end of the area you’re going to cut out by holding the blade up to the second line you drew and clamping scrap wood to the outside of the blade guard on the other side.

Those scrap pieces have essentially become your guides to make sure you don’t go too far and take out too much 4×4 which will make your legs wobbly.

Next, let your saw’s guard down so the blade will cut at a 1.75” depth (this is half the width of a 4×4, which is stupidly actually only 3.5”.)

Then you can let loose.

Make a whole lot of tiny cuts along your guided area. They don’t need to be too close together, but you also want the pieces left to be small enough you’re able to chisel out easily. It’s really a judgement call and trial and error.

Next, you’re going to grab a hammer and start knocking the little slices of wood out to make your notched area. The area that’s left may look a bit like an MMA fighter’s teeth at the end of a few rounds, but we used a flathead screwdriver (because we couldn’t find our chisel) and a hammer to flatten any bits we’d missed.

It was honestly much easier than it looked.

After fitting the X-shaped pieces together and briefly celebrating with a sweaty high-five (did we mention it was hot and we’re fat, sweaty pigs?) we moved on to the tabletop.

Assembling the Tabletop

We laid out the five 81.5” pieces of 2×8 boards side-by-side, then capped them off at the ends with the two 36.25” pieces of 2×8 to picture how it all fit together and get the spacing right. Then, we added two pocket holes at each end of each long 2×8 board, so that they would be drilled into the end cap pieces.

We used big, 4-foot clamps to hold all the long pieces together while we drove the pocket hole screws in, and used a new trick we learned to keep the pieces the right height.

Sometimes despite your best needle-in-a-haystack efforts to buy boards that are perfectly straight and level, they’re just not when you line them up. To fix this as you screw them together, grab a couple of 2x4s or other long scrap wood and lay them horizontally across all the long boards you’ve clamped together on top and underneath. Then, clamp those scrap pieces together to pull all the five long boards into line.

Once you’ve drilled in all the pocket holes, all your pieces should be nice and flat so you don’t have any uneven surfaces on your tabletop. We then reinforced the pieces (and further made sure they stayed aligned) by screwing two of the 34” 2x4s across all five long planks on the underside in the middle area. We just used 2.5-inch exterior wood screws and screwed them from the underside through the 2×4 into the tabletop so our screws wouldn’t show on top.

The cut list shows two more 2x4s, but we’ll get to those in a little bit.

Assemble the Base

By now your X-shaped legs have their lap joint cuts and are good to go, but now you’ve got to extra secure them. We held them up and propped up the 65” 4×4 (which will serve as a support beam) between the two sets of legs so it lined up with the lap join area.

Then, we took apart the two pieces of the X-shaped legs and drilled the half that sits flush against the 4×4 support piece right into it, making sure it was extra secure. Then, we put the second half of each leg back on and drove a huge, 5-inch exterior screw through both halves of the X-shaped legs and into the 4×4 support beam from the outside in. So, each side of the legs should have a wood screw holding the inner half of the legs to the 4×4, and another bigger screw holding all three pieces together.

Next, take the other two 34” pieces of 2×4 and line them up across the top of the legs. This is going to act as another support piece that holds the legs to the tabletop.

The 2x4s should be a little wider than the width of the X-shaped legs, don’t worry.

Connect the Base to the Top

You’re almost there!

Flip the tabletop upside down so the side with the pocket holes and 2×4 support pieces are facing up. Flip your table legs/base upside down and put it on the tabletop so the 2x4s are up against the table top. Make sure the legs are centered – they should be about 12” in from each end of the table.

Use the exterior wood screws to secure those 2x4s, and therefore the legs, to the tabletop.

Don’t Forget Your Benches!

At this point it had been about a day and a half of this project and we were getting to that wanting to be done stage, but since we had precut all the wood, it seemed within reach to just assemble (yet another benefit of precutting it all, or there’s a good chance we would’ve gotten lazy and just left the benches in their full wood plank form in our storage shed for at least three months).

Honestly, these benches took maybe 30 minutes for them both.

First, separate the 17.5” 4×4 pieces into sets of two, and each set of two will be one end of the bench legs. Then, secure them to each other side-by-side with two pocket holes for each set. Next, add two pocket holes to the top and bottom of each end of each 78” 4×4 piece. Phew, that’s confusing, but it’s 16 pocket holes in total for the 78″ pieces.

Then, sandwich one long piece of 4×4 between the 17.5” pairs you’ve made, propping that long piece – the support piece for the benches – up about halfway heightwise. Connect the pocketholes you made in the ends of the long 4×4 pieces to your 17.5” set of bench legs.

Then, set your 81” 2×10 pieces (the seat part of the bench) on top of your new bench base and screw it down using the exterior wood screws.

And you’re done!

It’s all assembled at this point and you could seal it and leave it at that if you wanted, but we took a few extra steps that made it look extra profesh.

Sand and Stain

Sanding this guy took a while but was so worth it. There were quite a few stamps and other markings on the wood we had to get rid of, and we dulled down the edges a little so they weren’t so sharp. When we first started DIY we didn’t realize how easy it is to just sand off those big, black scuffs or warehouse stamps on wood pieces. RIP to all the beautiful wood pieces we’ve passed up in our naivete.

Then we stained the whole table and the two benches with this Valspar stain and sealer combo in the Canyon Brown color. It went on more like paint than stain, in that you don’t need to wipe it off or wait for the color to soak in. It was really easy to use and went pretty quickly, just watch for drips because they form easily.

Take a look at how our DIY farmhouse outdoor table turned out!