How to Build a Children's Outdoor Play Table

I have two three-year-old granddaughters who love to search under rocks for bugs and worms. They will then take these bugs and put them in a large barrel planter my back yard to watch them. The problem was that I had planted climbing Morning Glories in the barrel and the girls bug activity was killing off the young sprouts. I needed to provide a table for their bug activity.

I had an old work table wasting away in back of the garage. Lately I have been paying more attention to recycling wood. With the high cost of new wood and environmental concerns it just makes sense to reuse wood instead of throwing it away and buying new. For this project you can use any old wooden table, preferable one which has sat outside will work. Make sure the wood is solid and not laminated so it does not come apart when it gets wet.

Mine was about four feet by three feet across the top and the standard height. There was some rotted wood plus I needed to lower the height of the table so I took it completely apart. Another reason to do this is to make certain you remove all old nails, or anything else sticking out which could hurt little kid's fingers. My table turned out to have hundreds of staples partially and fully driven around the top and the backsides of the legs.

Once the table was dismantled, I inspected all of the wood for rot and usability. The legs were badly rotted on the bottom but I was going to cut them down so they would still be useable. I discovered a nest of wood eating bugs under the table top which had to be cleared out. I decided to cut down the size of the table top to a more manageable two foot by three foot size. This also cut out all of the rot. Two of the sides were eaten out too badly to be reused and I had to cut new pieces to replace them. Altogether I only had to replace the two pieces and those came from my scrap lumber bin. I then took my rotary sander with a medium grade of sandpaper and sanded down all rough edges and anything which might splinter.

The next step is to rebuild the table. First is to determine a height. Mine is 20" which gives the girls plenty of room to stand comfortably at the table and to grow with it for a few years. As I cut the legs down, I cut the bottom of each at a 30-degree angle leaving a point. This allowed me to drive the legs into the ground so the table does not tip even if the girls try to climb on top, as they did the first time they played with it.

Since I knew, the girls would be climbing on the table I used extra bracing on the legs. These braces again came from my scrap lumber pile and are simply lengths of 2 X 4 cut to wrap around the legs directly under the table top where the legs attach. I could lower this bracing but with the short 20" height it is not necessary and this way the braces are partially hidden.

The last modification I made to the original table was to put a lip or railing around the table top. This extends three inches above the top and holds the mud which I have placed on the table.

Since all of the exposed wood is used and well-weathered I did not have to stain the table. This entire project took about two hours with no out of pocket expense. My granddaughters have already had hours of fun with the table and have found new uses for it that I never thought of.