Summer is FINALLY here! It took forever for the snow to stop and I’m super excited to be able to do things outside again. One of my favorite things to do in the summer is to eat outside. When we first moved into our house, I really wanted a large patio table to entertain guests but finding a set I liked at a reasonable price was near impossible. So today I’m going to show you how we took our old fence and made it into a patio table! This table is by no means perfect but it lasted two years and it was free, so I say it was definitely a great project!

Why I created the Table…

As I mentioned above, patio tables are freaking expensive. We just bought a house so we were not about to spend $1,000 on a patio set. We also had a strange fence situation in the back yard. The owners before us had a hot tub they fenced in for privacy, but we wanted the whole yard fenced in. So before they came to install the fence around our yard, we took down part of the fence around our hot tub to open up the space.

Once we had sections of the fence down, my husband was looking at it and he’s like it would be super easy to build a table out of this, so lets do it!

Where to Buy the Materials…

The best part of this project is the majority of it was free. We used recycled wood, polyurethane protectant* and a paint brush from Lowe’s and a saw. That’s it!

*I don’t remember which one we used but it ended up not being the best anyway. We still have the table two years later but the protective coat is basically non-existent so I can’t really recommend a good brand. If you want the table just for a short time, any outdoor polyurethane sealant would be good, if you want it longer than that perhaps someone at Lowe’s will have a better suggestion! 

How to Create the Fence Table…

We had sections of the cut-down fence, so we took the piece that would be a great size for our patio and removed the slats from one side and nailed it to the other. To explain this a little better, we had a shadow box fence so there are wooden slats on both sides for complete privacy. We used the slats from one side of the fence to fill in the holes from the other side to create a flat table.

Once we nailed everything together, we sawed both ends of the fence to the size we wanted and just like that we had a table top!

We then used left over fence posts from under our deck and cut them into four equal length pieces for the legs. We actually screwed this part up and didn’t measure the width of the chairs, so we put the legs too close together on the inside so the chairs don’t fit under the table together. You can still eat comfortably at the table so it’s not a huge deal, but I can’t store the chairs away nicely under the table when no one is using it which takes up a lot of deck space. So if you make this table, be sure to measure the chairs so it fits both width and height wise!

Once we had a completed table, we sanded the crap out of it because as you can imagine, it was a really rough table. When we decided it was smooth enough, we painted it with multiple coats of clear polyurethane to make it smoother and to protect the table top. We let the table dry overnight between coats. That’s it, in a couple of days we had a beautiful, recycled wood patio table!

As I mentioned earlier, it’s not perfect but it’s done a great job. We will most likely build a newer, nicer table that the chairs can fit under soon, but this table definitely did it’s job and I love the fact that it’s recycled from our previous fence.

For finishing touches, I bought the chairs on clearance at Meijer, the pillows at IKEA for super cheap and found pillow cases that fit perfectly on a site called GroopDealz, the rug came from TJ Maxx and the umbrella we found at the At Home store!