Mr. Fix It

I seem to be dogged by plow damage.  It doesn't simply extend to my wintertime jousting with the county plow and my mail box but recently it extended to the picnic table.

In 1998 I purchased a tubular-steel-framed picnic table assembly from Menards.  That and five six foot lengths of 2X9 treated lumber.  I pre-assembled the table top at home and shoved it along with the rest of the framing, benches and hardware into the back of my Toyota 4Runnner and Jill and I drove it to the farm.  Upon arrival we assembled it and left it at our ancestral campsite along Silver Creek.

This was home - a stone fire ring and a picnic table.  Add a solar shower, tent, tarp, cooler, camp stove, gas lantern along with an outdoor privy and this was how we lived at the farm for a number of years.  It was certainly rustic but it did the job.

In any event, I never did entertain any expectations that the picnic table would last much longer than a handful of years.  Sure, the treated lumber was durable but the inexpensive Menards frame kit would likely rust away in reasonably short order.  

Not so.  That picnic table is still with us and lives outdoors year-round.  And it gets plenty of use for just about everything imaginable but eating.  It's a handy workspace for out door use.

Nevertheless, a couple of winters ago we mistakenly left it north of the driveway within range of the guy who plows our snow.  And before we could move it to safe harbor the first heavy snow of the season arrived and so did the snow plow guy.  Getting-up a head of steam and about a ton of wet snow he never actually struck the picnic table with his blade  but the mountain of wet snow did and it bent the frame leaving one bench and part of the table top cattywumpus and uneven.

While the table remained serviceable it didn't look good.  It was annoyingly cattywumpus. For awhile I thought about getting a new frame kit from a big box building supply store but never actually acted on the notion.  After a couple of years the appearance got under my skin just enough that I decided to do something about it.

Gathering various odd-sized blocks of wood along with a one-and-a-half-ton bottle jack from the machine shed in the short time of a couple of hot sweaty hours I had everything realigned.  It's not perfect - but a 22 year-old picnic table that lives outdoors is never perfect. 

 
I did notice that the tubular steel frame and brackets are a bit corroded and my forcing everything back into alignment (without disassembly) likely shortened the remaining useful life of the frame.  Nevertheless, the treated wood is solid and if the frame fails I'll fetch another one from Menards and assemble another table using wood salvaged from the old table. 

That aught to get me somewhere close to ninety years of age - and close to fifty years for the table.