Thrifty DIY: How to upcycle scaffolding boards into a garden table

You may have spotted a sneaky peek of my scaffold board table in my blog post about building rustic benches for my garden but today I’m sharing the step-by-step tutorial with you so that you can have a go at making a DIY scaffolding table for yourself…

All you need for this project is some pressure-treated timber and a few old scaffold boards. You can source them secondhand from salvage yards or car boot sales – or you could even buy brand new scaffold boards at a fraction of the price of regular planed timber. Either way, it’s considerably cheaper than buying an outdoor dining table from the garden centre – have you seen those prices??

I’ve shared the full step-by-step guide to make this rustic and industrial scaffold board table on the Safestore blog so head over there today to check out the simple tutorial. It’s a low-cost way to get the custom outdoor dining table of your dreams in any size and any finish to suit your patio, deck, lawn or courtyard garden.

We finally finished installing our decking last month and we had a lot of space to play with on the deck for creating a dining area. We therefore went for a whopping SIX boards width for our huge outdoor table. I started off wanting it to be four boards wide, but when we laid them out side-by-side, it didn’t look wide enough for the space.

We then added a fifth scaffold board, which created a much better size tabletop, so I was happy to build the table at this width, and at a length of around 8ft. However, when I wasn’t looking, my husband cut an extra scaffold board and I just carried on sanding and painting the boards without noticing.

By the time I spotted that the table was six planks wide, it was too late – the base had already been screwed together. But when we carried the tabletop onto the deck, I’m pleased that we did go for such a sizeable table as it makes the most of the space available on the deck and allowed us to make three matching DIY bench seats from scaffold boards offcuts.

I went for a grey wash to make the wood look ‘aged’ so that it matched my old silvered garden bench. But you could paint your outdoor dining table any colour you like to coordinate with your garden, or you could sand and wax the scaffold boards to reveal the grain of the wood, or even stencil on a floral pattern or mandala design onto the tabletop for a boho finish.

Let me know what you think of my outdoor dining table and don’t forget to check out the step-by-step photos of the scaffold board table project here. I’d love to hear if you have a go at making an outdoor table for yourself so please leave me a comment below 🙂

PIN THIS PROJECT FOR LATER