RamblingFever Money: Rambling Road: The Kids Picnic Table Project

My wife jumped onto the internet super-highway this past week. Not sure if she went down Rambling Road or not, but she did somehow make it to Alaska! Here is why.. We have two young children and my wife runs a home daycare. The kids size picnic table we have is one of those plastic deals that we acquired from a garage sale (I think). It is starting to fall apart, and it is a bit small for some of the older kids. Several times in the past year or so I had mentioned that I wanted to build a kids size picnic table from scratch. I never got around to it. Well, I was pleasantly surprised earlier this week when my wife sent me a link to a web-site with plans for a kids size picnic table. I was even more pleasantly surprised to find out that the site is actually a blog, and is run by a lady up in Alaska! I decided to take on this project and came up with a plan to make somebody else pay for it.

My Free Picnic Table Project

First, I revisited Ana White’s post on how to build this picnic table and printed out the instructions. I went to Lowe’s and bought enough lumber, screws and bolts to make two picnic tables. The total cost for all of this was about $75. The plan is to make two and hopefully sell the other one on Craigslist for the total cost of both of them.

The project went very smooth and turned out very well. I modified the instructions slightly, and used three 2x8’s for the table top instead of four 2x6’s. I also used a 2x8 for the seats instead of two 2x4’s. I drilled a hole into the center of the table top of the one that we are going to keep. This is so we can insert our beach umbrella, resulting in a perfect kids size picnic table complete with umbrella for shade.

It remains to be seen whether or not somebody will buy the second table for $75. I am going to post it on Craigslist later today. I might even offer to deliver it to the greater Grand Rapids area for an extra $5 or $10. If this thing sells pretty quickly, I may have just stumbled into another little side hustle business. The entire project, start to finish, only took about five hours. This includes the trip to Lowe’s and clean-up afterwards. This does not include staining the table, which we have not done yet. It only took me an hour and a half to build the second table. I could whip up two picnic tables in a half a day on any weekend that I’m not doing anything better and sell them for a good profit.

Rambling Road: Week Ending 03.17.12
First, a pretty cool thing happened involving one of my posts this week. I don’t know how they found my site or this post, but here’s what happened.. On Wednesday, the blog section of CreditKarma.com (a pretty popular site) featured one of my posts as the headline for their Wednesday Roundup! Very exciting stuff for me, as my site has received a good number of hits as a result.

Now, on to Rambling Road and my ventures around the internet this past week. Most of these links are money related and lead to personal finance sites. A few of them are blog related, and one is about kids and vegetables. Check out a bunch of these, as I only include the stuff I’ve read this week that I think is worth sharing.