How to Refinish a Picnic Table with Paint

I originally published this tutorial on Crafting a Green World.

You've got to paint a few coats of sealant on your picnic table, anyway, if you want it to last outdoors--you might as well paint something interesting onto it first!

You can do this project on a picnic table of any age. If your picnic table is old and care-worn, replace any rotten wood and sand the other surfaces down to clean boards, first. If your picnic table is brand-new, you can paint right onto the unfinished wood.

Supplies & Tools

Either way, you'll need the following supplies:

• Water-based outdoor primer. 
• Water-based outdoor paint. Avoid oil-based paint, which generally has more VOCs than water-based paint, and requires paint thinner to clean up. You can use any water-based outdoor paint, and look for the smaller, approximately 200 mL "sample" containers to avoid waste. For this project, I bought 200 ml containers of Dutch Boy Maxbond Exterior in satin. There's just enough paint to refinish my two picnic tables, one old and one new, and freshen up the work on the deck chairs that I refinished here on CAGW four years ago.
• Paintbrushes. I used large paintbrushes for the primer and the sealant, and a selection of small artist's brushes to paint the colorful details onto my picnic table.
• Measuring and marking tools. These might include a pencil, meter sticks or rulers, and masking tape.
• Polyurethane sealant. Buy water-based polyurethane sealant to make this project more eco-friendly. I used to be reluctant to use polyurethane sealant altogether because of its environmental footprint, but watching my deck furniture rot and need to be replaced after just a couple of seasons of Midwestern weather taught me that it's better to do what it takes to make things last. If you know of a better alternative, do me a favor and let me know in the Comments below!

Directions

1. Prime the picnic table.

You only need to prime the area that you'll be working on, as you can otherwise seal the bare wood of the underside of the picnic table and benches. I used white primer, but I'd actually recommend avoiding white unless you really want that specific color in the background of your design, or you plan to completely cover the white with another color. Even after several coats of sealant, white quickly looks dirty, and that happens all the more quickly outside. If I had this project to do again, I'd have instead started with a slate grey or blue for the picnic table's top.

2. Sketch out the design.

You can draw your design with a pencil directly onto the primed surface of the picnic table. I wanted this picnic table to have a chessboard, tic tac toe board, and colorful board game path painted onto it, so I first sketched them all in with pencil.

For the chessboard, I used two-meter sticks to measure out a 16x16" square, centered between the two picnic benches, and then I divided the square into an 8x8" array.

For the board game path, I used masking tape to lay a curving path around the perimeter of the picnic table. Masking tape can even be used to make smooth curves if you tear off and layer short pieces.

I traced the path in pencil, tore off all of the tape, and then divided the path into 2" steps.

I also used masking tape to lay out the tic tac toe board, then traced around it in pencil and tore off the tape.

3. Paint the picnic table.

This part of the process takes the longest, because you must wait for a color to dry before you can begin painting an adjacent color, and each color might require 2-3 coats before it looks saturated.

After the entire picnic table is painted, you can paint on the polyurethane sealant. This also takes a while, since there are several coats to add, and it can take up to a week for the last coat of sealant to fully cure for use.

But the time-intensive process is well worth it when you see the beautiful result!

The well-sealed surface of our picnic table ensures that we can use it as-is for all of our other outdoor projects and fun, but there's nothing like sitting down to a quick game of tic tac toe using twigs and leaves while we're waiting for one last person to finish getting ready before we all hop in the car, or grabbing the bag of mismatched chess pieces for one game of chess that turns into eight games on a lovely spring evening.

That's a lot of multi-purpose fun from just a few colors of paint!

Chess Classes from Chessology: Will Loved Them!

For the past couple of months Will has been a beta tester for Chessology, guinea pigging the development of a new online chess class. She took the class with the other children also beta testing, giving her teacher a real-world model to work through technical issues and develop strategies, and I provided feedback about her experience, to help him troubleshoot and make improvements.

The final result was a chess class that I just can't say enough about.

Willow LOVED her teacher, Coach Atkins, who was really personable and great with the kids. He teaches all the classes, using a webcam and a large wall-mounted chessboard:

Will's class ran from 9-10 on Saturday mornings--hence the doughnut!

The kids also use their webcams for a portion of every class, so that they can see each other and Coach Atkins can see all of them, but mostly they communicate through chat--one of the first skills that Coach Atkins taught them was algebraic notation, so that they can answer his questions and offer solutions to his puzzles and propose moves in demo games without having to have too much keyboarding ability:

One of my biggest pet peeves is the kids missing an activity that I've paid for, and I always try to route vacations to avoid missing activities as much as possible, so my favorite thing about this summer Saturday class was the fact that since it occurred online, Will could attend class wherever we had an internet connection. She attended class in hotels in Arkansas, Ohio, and Pennsylvania, and if they hadn't had internet, I was prepared to drive her to Starbucks and just drink a giant coffee while she had her class--the sacrifices that we're willing to make for our kids' education!

Parents are expected to sit next to their kids and supervise during class which, while it means that I'm chained to the table for an hour doing paperwork (and the crossword puzzle!), it does turn out to be really useful. I've never formally studied chess, so I find learning about strategies like cascading pawns and en passant really useful. I can also pick out things like vocabulary terms and specific rules and strategies to add to Will's memory work--as an active scholastic player, she should learn that stuff, and it can only help her game. And since every week when I ask Will after class what her homework was and she says, "We didn't get any homework," and nearly every week they DO, in fact, get homework, it's also pretty useful that I'm sitting right there to hear and write down the homework assignment. 

A lot of the homework assignments have involved practice games set up in specific ways to teach specific strategies--

These cat and mouse games, set up in various ways, have really worked to make Will way more aggressive with her checkmate.

--and an interesting set of puzzles that turned possibilities for checkmating the king into an algebraic equation. It was pretty darn brilliant, and we've been using it ever since: 

You can see how it works in Coach Atkins' video about how he teaches it:

The girls have also been balancing equations in The Life of Fred, as well, so it's nice to have it all meet up.

I had several people ask me about the classes when I bragged about them on my Craft Knife Facebook page, back when registration wasn't open to anyone outside of the beta testing children, but now registration is open to everyone! Through August 1 you can actually get half off the registration price because we were beta testers and you know us (sort of), so you can click on the 50% off button and then name drop "Willow Indiana" as your beta tester buddy.

Okay--funnily enough, Will is actually at our town's scholastic chess club right now, along with Matt and Syd, so I'm off to eat frozen Kashi pizza and some cherries while reading my Dexter novel, figure out a pillowcase pattern to make from some organic flannel that I was given to review in the coming week for Crafting a Green World, weed my messy garden, and start on a frittata for dinner.

And yes, I may never make it past the Dexter novel on this to-do list.

Still Life with Chess Pieces

Will and I still have a regular (and fun!) chess study together. We play often, with me at various levels of handicaps from the slight to the slightly ridiculous--

If there was a tutor to be had I'd obtain one for her, but as it is we subsist, as well, on episodes of Elliott Chess School, bi-monthly chess club meetings, games of Fritz and Chesster, and the odd chess puzzle.

We don't have one complete chess set between us, but instead dozens of partial sets that we cobble together to play, with several dozen other chess pieces sitting unused in Will's chess bag during any given game. While we play, Sydney amuses herself greatly with the single activity that is perhaps Willow's most hated thing for her sister to do (in other words, she hates this even MORE than when Sydney says "It doesn't care" instead of "It doesn't matter," and even more than when Sydney plays audiobooks at bedtime without plugging in her headphones, and even more than when I ask the girls if they want to go to the library and Sydney says that she doesn't):

She plays with the unused chess pieces.

A lover of small things, Sydney sets elaborate scenarios for the chess pieces to play out, sorts them, makes patterns with them, personifies them into real kings and queens (or fairies and unicorns), and never EVER puts them away without being prompted. Apparently she also photographs them, since this is what I found on my camera the other day:

I can only imagine what imaginative scenario is being played out here.

With all her time with the chess pieces, Sydney has never expressed an interest in learning, herself, although she's witnessed so many matches that I'd be surprised if she didn't already understand how to play. Her imagination, however, is thoroughly enriched by chess, and I can't imagine a better background to the game.

October School

I have the feeling that this is our last REAL month of school until January. We'll have just a week of real, regular school in November before we head out for a week-long homeschool road trip, then a week-long Thanksgiving plane trip (and then a week to recover? Perhaps!), and who knows how much will get accomplished in December before I throw my hands up for the month and just give the girls up to ornament crafting and endless letters to Santa?

Fortunately, it feels as if we got a lot done in October, even if it never actually feels like we get anything done  on any given day:

Chess

Will and I have been playing chess quite happily for logic study. Will goes to a scholastic chess club twice a month, and in between we've been watching episodes of Elliott's Chess School and practicing the strategies together--

--and just playing! I've discovered how to make the game a fair fight by handicapping myself--

--and so Will has started to get in some legitimate checkmates against me.

math

Variety is the spice of life, and thus math has gotten a (little) better this month. Both girls are doing memory drills once a week--

candy corn arithmetic puzzle

--and a variety of problems on grade-level math apps once a week--

--as well as learning new stuff. Will and I are in the home stretch with subtraction with borrowing (the last thing being borrowing across zeros), and Syd is quite ready to move on to big number building and multi-digit addition. Before we start that, however, and before Will starts multiplication, we're zipping through this little unit:

I've built a couple of Montessori-style time telling works, and I don't think it will take long for the girls to get the process down pat.

I really want MORE math, though, so I've started adding a second math work every school day--these math journals:

I set out the prompts a couple of weeks at a time, and I try to make each prompt very different, while also requiring a review or application of a skill that's already been mastered. This way, the journal prompts are fairly quick to complete, fairly fun, and can be done independently, including being done on the bleachers while one kid takes her ice skating class, or on the bench outside the ballet studio while the other kid dances.

music

We've still been having fun with mom-led lessons on the keyboard, violin, guitar, and recorder:

Each week each kid picks if she wants to do a music lesson that week (they usually do), with a week's worth of daily practice to follow and a "recital" at the end of the week. It's working really well so far!

Latin

Willow and I are still exploring in this subject. She's pretty resistant to conjugations and declensions at the moment, so we've been doing a lot of playing lately, trying to find a fun way to learn. Will did a couple of lessons on Mango Latin, which we can access through our public library--

--but ultimately decided that she doesn't like this program, either. I may switch to doing Latin only once a week, which will mean SLOOOOW progress, but progress nonetheless.

history

There has been a lot of historical fiction lately, with Syd playing her Little House and American Girl audiobooks from the library on the family stereo. We've also FINALLY moved into chapter two of Story of the World, where we may stay for the rest of the year, frankly, since who would ever want to leave the Egyptians?

For SOTW, we listen to the chapter on audiobook (while the girls do various odd things to occupy their hands, sigh)--

--answer the quiz questions, review the old quiz questions, do the mapwork, and then move on to the projects... so many projects!

reading

Hallelujah, Sydney is now able to read some of the easier Dr. Seuss titles! She and I are also still reading Bob books together, AND I've just discovered the new Electric Company on Netflix--how did I not know about that show?!? 

One of the interesting things that I've noticed about Sydney is that she can actually read far more than she thinks she can read--she often brings me things like instructions for something, or comic strips, to read for her that she could actually read for herself... and DOES after I ask her to! Although Will doesn't really like WeGiveBooks.org anymore because she claims that the book selection is too baby-ish, I have Syd spend some time on the site once a week or so:

She's so content spending long periods of time "looking at" books like these that I figure that she must be reading them, whether she realizes it or not.

Will and I stalled out on grammar this month. She's been so resistant to schoolwork lately that I've cut way down on even offering dry subjects. Maybe I'll sneak the rest of nouns and verbs in during the next two months, when sit-down schoolwork is definitely going to seem a novelty.

science

I keep meaning to start the entire unit on human biology that I've put together, but we got pleasantly distracted by autumn, which mean lots of time in nature, lots of leaf work--

--and lots of field trips to goof around with apples and pumpkins and tons of other kids.

Starting tomorrow, our entire schoolwork will revolve around preparations for our giant road trip in a couple of weeks--we'll read the Misty of Chincoteague books, learn about the monuments along the National Mall, and figure out what we're going to see in the Smithsonian museums. The girls are going to finish learning how to tell time, then start some new math while reviewing the old. We're going to start our Thanksgiving crafting early, since we'll have so little time at home next month.

And then we're going to go on vacation!

Chess Bag

We do not have a complete set of chess pieces; instead, we have what seems like a dozen incomplete sets of chess pieces. When we play, we organize them like "I've got the darkish pieces, and you've got the light-ish ones," or "I've got the browny ones, and you've got the reds," or "I've got the big ones, and you've got the tiny ones."

Will used to keep all her pieces in a gallon-sized Ziploc bag, until I finally got embarrassed enough about watching her cart a dirty plastic bag of mis-matched chess pieces to chess club and tournaments, surrounded by those kids with the competition-style chess sets and the private chess tutors, to sew her up a bag for holding chess pieces that is worthy of my own little chess-playing kid.

The pattern for the bag is as simple as it could get--it's just my drawstring bag tutorial, sized up to match that big old Ziploc bag that I was pretty happy to throw in the trash. The real fun came in finding a stencil of chess pieces online, cutting it out of contact paper and ironing it to the bag, and then having Willow paint it:

We both ended up VERY pleased with our efforts:

And then off it went to chess club!

Checkmate!

I normally don't let my kids win when we play games. In most board games, like Sorry or Monopoly, or games of chance, like War, they've got enough of a fighting chance without me throwing the game, and in other games, like Scrabble or Quirkle, we don't keep score at all, and in games of skill or logic, like chess or poker, I don't think it's reasonable for them to expect to win the majority of the time when playing adults, and instead I encourage them to focus on the pleasure of a game well played, and the etiquette of good sportsmanship. Syd still throws the occasional fit when she loses a game, and needs to be reminded that a competitive game requires an opponent with the same skill set, and a game of chance chooses its own winners, and good sportsmanship is a behavioral requirement in our family.

It's funny, then, that before Will's latest chess competition, I spent several weeks deliberately throwing games to her. Will loves to play, and has great strategy for a kid her age, but she doesn't tend to aim for checkmate, which means that she tends to lose games against kids who may be less adept players, but who focus all the strength of their young wills into mating her king. Of course Will doesn't care, because she just likes the play, but before this latest competition I wanted to gently, very gently, encourage her to play more aggressively for checkmate.

Argh, such a fine line to walk! Should I focus her at all, or just let her be? Was I sending the message that good sportsmanship means that you can't be competitive? Am I now sending the message that a game isn't fun unless you're trying to win? What message does it also send that 99.9% of the other children at these competitions are boys?

I still can't decide.

Nevertheless, for a few weeks before the competition, Will and I played chess games in which she had a special assignment: checkmate Momma! To take the dive while not make moves so ridiculous as to ruin her good strategies (which depend on logical counter-moves), I pretended that I was playing speed chess, giving myself zero time to contemplate before moving.

And it was--as chess ALWAYS is--fun!

Will has a special skill for eating away her competitor's pieces, whether or not she's gunning for checkmate, so that often her opponents with their laser focus on checkmate don't even really notice the attrition until they suddenly realize that they've basically been forced into a draw:

 How fun!

Also fun, it turns out? That elusive and long sought-after checkmate!

Will had a lot of fun in her chess competition and did well there, but without another competition on the horizon until September, we're back to our normal play. My new chess goals for Will are to encourage her to play more games with the children at her bi-monthly chess club, and to begin learning some formal opening, endgame, and piece-specific strategies that she can then have in her memory to utilize during play.

However...when I think about some of the child (and adult!) behavior that I've witnessed at chess competitions, I'm hugely grateful for my non-competitive kid, whose love of simply playing the game helps me remember to de-emphasize winning in my own life, as well.

Of course, I'm more of a work in progress on that one...