Last fall my wife Anita and I redid our screened in porch. Since then we’ve slowly added furniture to the room but what we really need is a table to put our 20-year-old TV on. Right now the TV sits on a big clay pot with a piece of plywood on top. Not an ideal place for a TV so she asked me to build something quick to use for out there. So I designed this table which measures 56″ long x 17″ deep x 30″ tall.

Because the table will be outside, I decided to build it out of 2 x 8’s in case it gets destroyed by the weather. Plus, I really didn’t feel like spending the money on something more weather appropriate like cedar or teak. The 2 x 8’s around here are Southern Yellow Pine and if you scavenge through a pile, you can find some clean board free from knots. Once I bought the boards I let them acclimate in my shop for a couple of weeks.

Since 2 x 8’s are 7 1/4″ wide, it was a no brainer to make the sides of the table 7″. In some cases I was able to rip the boards in half on my bandsaw to yield two thinner pieces. Because the boards are a 1 1/2″ thick, cutting them in half yielded a two boards 11/16″ thick rough sawn. I kept planing those boards to 1/2″ thick and used them as the drawer stock.

I tried using the grain to my advantage as best as I could. The bottom slats only being 1/4″ thick are susceptible to warping so I cut them with quarter sawn or rift sawn wood.

Those aren’t dovetails!

What can I say, I wasn’t in the mood to cut half blind dovetails. I’ve used this pin joint in the past when I built my toolbox ten years ago. Those have held up fine over the years and these drawers are going to get minimum use so I’m not too concerned.

Anita plans on painting the piece with gray chalk paint and distress it a little to make it look old. Painted gray with some nice old style handles and this table will be a show stopper in our screened in porch. But I have a feeling a new flat screen will be on top of it instead of a 20 year old dinosaur.