101 in 1001: Build a Work Station for Porch

The tough thing about living in a condo is that if you need to do some labor like sawing or anything, you don't have a lot a space to do it in. That becomes even harder when you have someone like Morgan around that constantly wants to do projects.

I do all the work out on the porch, but it's really small and I end up doing most of the work while sitting on the ground. Plus, I have to put all my hardware and tools on our dining table we have out there. So, Morgan suggested I build a small table to do some basic work on and have a place to put my materials.

The way the porch is built, there are two small alcoves on each side. One of them has a cat tree in it for Bear, so I thought the best place would be on the other side in an L-shape around the column.

I didn't want to spend too much money on a table that was going to be used for work, so I searched for some good, free wood for a while. One night, while walking the dog, I saw someone had thrown out some pallets, so I decided to grab two of them.

Check out my actually good design for a mobile workbench!

How I built a screened porch workstation

First step was to tear them apart and salvage the wooden slats. This turned out to be a much harder task than I thought. Those pallets were meant to hold tons of weight and be re-used over and over again. That means they are meant to be durable, therefore they are hard to break apart.

I drew out a small diagram and measured the space. Once I had the pallets torn into pieces, I cut the slats into the lengths they needed to be and laid them out on the porch floor.

Then I cut some of the thicker pieces of wood from the sides of the pallets as braces for the parts of the table.

I finished off the top of the table by using more pieces of the slats to connect the two pieces of the L-shape.

The only part of this project that cost me any money was that I bought a 10 foot 2"x4" for the legs. I wanted five legs for this table that were 39 inches long.

I had one nine foot 2"x4" already to cut, so I spent $4.50 on this entire project by buying that one piece of wood. I cut the legs to the right lengths and then attached them with brackets to the table top. Finally, I used some more slats to brace the legs to each other.

Last thing I did was drill extra screws through the top of the table into the legs just to make sure it was steady. Then it was ready to work!

This was a really great idea for a project and was basically free. We have already put the table to good use on a couple of projects we'll be sharing with you soon! Plus, this is half of #73 off of our 101 in 1001 list. Once I finished organizing the shed, we'll have that one off the list!

Tell us about your latest free project!