I Built a $12,000 Outdoor Patio Sectional for $997

On this channel, we've built tons of different outdoor furniture, saving ourselves thousands of dollars by building them ourselves. Well, today we'll be embarking on our biggest project yet. >> Building the largest, most expensive outdoor piece of furniture, [music] and we're only doing it for a thousand dollars. >> This is our outdoor patio, and it's the most perfect place to entertain and host gatherings. But, however, it's not ready yet. It's missing something. And what it's missing is a giant outdoor U-shaped sectional that is almost like a an exotic lounge that you could see. Well, we found the most perfect $12,000 outdoor sectional that I can't afford. But, guess what? We're going to build it ourselves, and we're going to try to do it for a thousand dollars or less. That seemed damn near impossible, but let's see what we can do about it. All right, so first things first, I got a bunch of wood that I just picked up, and I need to cut up. And I just noticed that somehow I end up doing these outdoor projects in the worst possible weather. That's my luck for you. Let's get into it. Anytime I'm building outdoor furniture, especially stuff you're going to sit on, I try to reverse engineer it backwards. So, I start with getting the cushions. So, I found these ones on Amazon. The most important part is the cushion is thick. The cheaper stuff it's like 4 in thick. The thicker the better. I found these for 6 in thick. There's eight pieces, 24 by 24, plenty of sitting space. I got that going. That is getting delivered next week. Now, we don't have to wait on that. I printed out the actual style of the build that we're doing, and the way I'm reverse engineering is I think I'm going to build it in two different sections, right? We're going to have uh essentially the couches, build two couches, and then we're going to build two filler seats. That'll come together. Now, this is important because now my brain kind of knows where we're going, and the direction we're taking. So, now I can kind of go on autopilot as I'm chopping all the wood up. So, for this project we're going with a Douglas fir. Now, don't worry. Douglas fir is one of the hardest things to stain just cuz of the red pigment inside of it, but we're going to be painting this. But, we still need to kind of flatten some of these things out. Like this one's kind of cupping right there. I have my thickness planer here that we can fix that problem, but to make sure that you take care of your equipment, make sure you remove any of these staples that are in the wood. Um and don't just prime out or try to prime out with your screwdriver. Um I like to lift them a little bit, but then use your pliers. And the reason why is if you break up a piece of one of these and still in there and you run it through your joiner or thickness planer, you can say goodbye to those knives. They're gone. You're going to have to get new ones and get that re-sharpened. So, >> [sighs] >> and then ask me how I know that. Cuz I've been there. And in fact, the joiner that's right behind Kyle that's standing there, uh it's creating a bunch of different cuts and grooves. So, I got a new set of blades that's sitting right there. Let me pull these out. We'll flatten them out and then I'm going to trim off any of these round over edges just so we get nice clean lines cuz we want this thing to look luxury and not just out of dimensional lumber. Ah, our dust is already full. I I emptying the dust canister. It never goes well for me. Please don't be clogged up. Oh, she's to the brim, son. Look at this. Finest American grade sawdust you'll find in the valley. Need a trash bag. I hate this. I should wear a respirator. I just don't know where it is. All right. So, the way I usually do it is I try to shove it, but it creates a vacuum pressure. So, you're kind of dealing against science, you know? So, to solve that man, >> [snorts] >> This is the sucky part because you're going against the vacuuming of it. It's like sucks the bag in cuz all the air's out. So, if I put my foot down here, try to keep the bag in and the dust out. It's the worst ever. Hate this part. Okay. Now, got to flip it over so it doesn't spill. Put this back in. There, that wasn't too bad. But believe [snorts] me when I say this, that's not going to be the last time I'm emptying out the dust chute. The way these Douglas firs are, I mean, they need some cleaning up for sure. >> So we're working on the back parts of the sectional here and I got all the edges trimmed off and what we're going to do is we're going to assemble this. Well, that's a a surprise. >> [snorts] >> I got to trim these down even more. So the backrest itself is going to be 27 in tall. Now the reason I came up with that number is based off of the cushions that I got. The thing, you know, the the bottom six and the backrest it adds up to 27. So these are 27 and I need them to be spaced out just a little bit for that cool I don't know, modular kind of look. I don't know if I'm thinking of the right thing. So I need to I need to break down these a little bit more and then we'll put pocket holes and then we'll start rocking this out. >> A little longer than [music] a few minutes later. >> This is exactly what I was looking for. I was looking for an eighth of a gap here. So now listen, a lot of you guys always ask me, "Hey, do you have plans for this or is it even useful for me to mention these numbers and measurements cuz you're watching a video, you're not like writing it down." So here's what I'll do for you guys. Don't worry, I'll make PDF plans for you guys to get these. In fact, by the time this video comes out the plans will be done and you can scan this QR code right there. It'll direct you exactly straight to these plans or if you missed out you can go in the description, but you'll be well taken care of. Don't worry. So the glue I'm going with the Titebond 3. Why? It's waterproof so we can use it exterior and interior applications. Next things up, we're going to space them about an eighth of an inch apart cuz that's how we did our calculations. Pocket screws, exterior grade. These are coated already, so they're fine. I don't know why they went with blue, that's kind of interesting. And then pocket holes, I use my Kreg foreman. It's a big machine. Unless you're doing, you know, kitchen cabinets all the time, it's not really necessary. There's so many different styles of pocket holes. In fact, I bet you I got one that's small in here that anybody can just go buy and start using. Oh, yeah, look at that. Kreg mini. A fantastic. Clamp it, go, it just takes a little bit longer. [music] That's all. All right, got my pocket holes here. I did a little bit of a strategic move. Number one, pocket holes are going to be on the back, so meaning my cushions are going to cover it. Fantastic. The back of it that's going to be exposed is I picked the least amount of knots, so I don't have to fill them. Uh this came out perfect. Now, because I'm building two couches and then two filler pieces at a time, I need to build two more of these and then we could join them together with pocket holes. So, this will be essentially this and then one more and then one more tied together making this thing one giant back piece on one couch. >> Time to sandwich these suckers together. Plenty of wood glue. I decided to just put holes on the middle one. It's just going to be easier to put them all together. Symmetry is sexy. That's the way I look at it. All right. We have officially our backrest for our couch. These are exactly 24 in apart, which is our cushions. Now, what I need to do here is imagine this is the front of this thing, right? So, we're going to put one more of these panels right here to close it off. And then over here, we're going to do a traditional armrest. And that will be our funky little couch. I built these little triangle corners to keep things square. You can let go of that Kyle now. And I'm glad I did. And it doesn't take much to build them. You just couple of pieces of plywood. Glued and screwed together. And then as long as you have your table saw perfectly dialed in, you should be 100% fine to go. And I'm glad I built them cuz they're super handy in situations like this. Good morning. Today's the next day. I got a fresh haircut. I am going to do something that's going to save myself some time. I finished all the panels. And I was thinking I was like, I can just spend an entire day sanding them all flush. Or I can go to my local workshop or woodshop and see if they'll sand it to me as well. So, I got these panels ready as well. And so, I found somebody local. I've never done this. I'm going to go drop them off. They said they can do it all in about an hour, which is going to save me basically an entire day. Let's go see how it looks. Oh man, I've only been here for like 30 minutes. The guys are almost done. This is a place in Boise. It's called Wood Labs. It's in Eagle technically. Incredible. They sell lots of cool custom furniture here. Uh but at the same time, apparently you can just rent some of their equipment. I've never done this before. I'll tell you exactly what it cost. I'm cuz this is a lifesaver. If we're going to keep doing this, you can build kitchen cabinets at scale. They're going to come out flawless. You're not wasting an entire day of sanding. Stay tuned. We'll find out all the deets. All right. In and out in 27 minutes. Absolutely ridiculous. I told the guys like this is a drive-by sanding. I've never seen this before. Uh the total was $305. Now, it's for basically an hour worth of rental. So, I could have brought more stuff to get sanded. It's like 150 for setup. I think it's 120 for the hour and then like I think $30 for the belt itself that you're buying. Um I I I think it's worth it. Saved myself a ton of time. Basically an entire day of sanding. Not to mention, it's actually a quality job of sanding. Everything's same thickness. Um this is not going to be included in the actual total $1,000 budget. That's just for me to speed up the process of getting this video done, the project's done, and get this video out to you guys. So, enough yapping. Let's get this stuff back and get to work. Ooh, she'll be looking nice. So, you can kind of see the layout this is going to be in. It's kind of like in a U, I'm going to have two extra seating chairs in the middle here. Um these are the backrest. We need to start working on the armrest for the front. They're just going to be rectangular, nice and simple, and it's going to make it look more inviting as opposed to like a closed-off section like that. Dude, I am so freaking excited. The fact that I took this to the shop, I got an entire day back. Like, I don't have to spend the entire day sanding, and even with that sanding, I know this thing is going to be all wavy. Not with them. Everything is so clean, so flush, and so straight. Couldn't be happier. Expensive, but money well spent. Let's start gluing up some of these armrests, and then we can work on the bottoms. So, this are three. Ooh, it finally stopped raining. Oh, this is so nice. Oh, we got some time to apply some fertilizer. Do you know what's the hardest part about taking care of your lawn? Is the chemicals. You don't know what chemicals you need, when you need to apply them. Heck, even what kind of soil is needed to support those chemicals. Well, things are so much easier now with Sunday. Sunday has made homeownership and taking care of a lawn so much easier. You simply just plug in your address, and it gives you an aerial view and the exact soil samples that are in your area. 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I do need to Well, I think piece right here we can connect it to the bottom piece. So, uh what I'm going to need to do from the inside here, I'm going to throw some pocket holes, secure it uh What is that? Horizontally? And then, once we start building the base, we'll be able to secure it uh completely around, so it's not going to go nowhere. But, this is looking slick. I really like this a lot. And this is wide enough that you can use it as a coaster and put your coffee cup, maybe a cocktail. A lot of activities. Here's what I'm thinking for the base. Going to keep the lines clean. Got some 2x4s, cleaned the edges off here, got pocket holes screwed into here. We're going to secure this at the side, secure this towards the back or from the back inside, and then I'm going to take one of these common woods that are useless pieces of wood that they sell um that are not good for build anything cuz they're they're just it's just ugly. It's just the most ugliest wood you could find. However, it's really useful for like bottoms for your mattresses or seat cushions. So, what we're going to do is we're going to trim some of it off, create a lip here, attach it to the sides, and then fit all of these nice and snug inside, and then I'm going to put a brace down below, and then from the bottom we'll put a peg to support it. So, essentially, down the middle there's going to be support, so a big dude like myself and maybe a couple of us can sit down on it and not break this thing into a bunch of toothpicks. We got a bit of a design change here last minute. I'm not a furniture maker at all. I reserve that title for artists. I'm just an idiot with a YouTube channel. I think I need strength more than aesthetics here, so instead of recessing them down, I'm not going to have enough meat on the side to actually hold them straight or strong. Uh I'm going to have them sit on top. Now, I think based off of like the mattress bottom or cushion sitting down, not seeing the ends of these cleats is the only thing that's important to me right now. I have an overlap here of the cushion that's going to come out about an inch. You're not going to see this piece, and because we're going to look down, I think the cushion is going to cover the end pieces of these cleats. That's the way I'm kind of phrasing it in my mind. I think end of the day, we're all going to be just fine. And then I added another brace down below cuz that's where the peg's going to go, and that, my friend, is going to where the real strength is going to come from. Okay, so the original design has inch and a half base a base to it and that's because the cushions are like 10 inches thick. Our cushions are six. So, we're going to have to make up the distance cuz the distance of the seating cushion to the absolute floor is like 15 inches. And the way we can make it up to that is by using a 2 by 8 for the bottom. My only concern that it's going to look funky cuz it's not as deep as the original, but I'm [snorts] kind of doing like a dry fit and I think this might look okay. Well, there you have it. It's not in the cards. I think I'll be fine. I I Yeah, I think I'll be fine. This is weird, but I think I'll be fine. >> Oh my god, I don't know if this is going to work. Oh, there we go. Yeah, that looks pretty damn cool. I kind of like how this is recessed, too. I actually really like how this turned out. Now, keep in mind I'm I'm going to be sitting 6 inches ish higher. So, my arms will be able to Let me see if I can sit up with that. Man, this table's going to break on me. Going to be sitting kind of like this. This is perfect. >> [music] >> This is absolute perfect lounge position if there was one. I'm going to bust out another one. Uh but before I can bust out another one, let's see what the design is going to be for the middle chairs. So, everything's going to go straight forward on the middle pieces exactly kind of like the couch except for one part. Obviously, there's no side parts for you to, you know, reinforce this. So, here's what I'll tell you. Uh have a some reinforcements. Never skimp out on wood glue. Uh if you can put wood glue and screws together, fantastic. But, even better, when you do use wood glue, make sure you get wood glue on both sides. It's kind of like doing backsplash or any kind of tile work, right? You're going to put the mortar on both the wall and the tile piece, right? For the better connection or adhesion. You're going to do the same thing with uh gluing things up. Now, we are also going to add on these filler pieces pocket holes on both sides and possibly even the benches. And the reason why is when we put it all together, you don't want somebody to lean back on a middle piece and have it snap off. We want to reinforce it with the side stuff. So, we're going to throw these pocket holes. We're not going to glue them up, but it's going to be something to join it together that you can take apart, move if you need to move them, and then put them back together again. >> Here is our base. It looks fantastic. Good news, bad news. Good news is everything's going as planned. We have a good game plan going. Bad news is I still need to build two more bases for a middle and the couch. And that means I'm short three 2 by 8's and three 2 by 4's possibly. So that's awesome. I already know that we're going to be over our budget probably cuz I'm already sitting at $995. And we still need to buy paint. So it's going to be fun to find out how far off budget we're going to be towards the end of this episode. Stay tuned. We'll find out and have a heart attack together. No, it'll be fine. I'm sure it'll be fine. Or we won't. I'm sure it'll be fine. Or we won't. I guess we'll find out. >> [laughter] >> Okay, good news, bad news. >> [snorts] >> Good news is it only cost me 80 bucks to get this all finished up. Bad news, well there's two types of bad news. Number one, I feel like I need one more of these to make this spread out. It will look inviting enough, not claustrophobic, and it will give us extra space down below to put like a fire pit or a coffee table or whatever. Second thing, and this is priority number one. These armrests are way too tall. I was kind of eyeballing it, but I mean this is not comfortable at all. And it looks kind of funky to be honest with you. It just looks like this rectangular box. It's glued [snorts] and it's screwed. I can pop the nails or screws off, but there's not a whole lot I can do about the wood glue. So here's my solution to it. We're just going to cowboy up. I'm going to take those screws off. We're going to try using like a Japanese handsaw to carefully drop this down, cut across, and then hopefully we can reuse it and secure it somewhere around here. I think that will kind of accomplish this like low to the ground look. And I'm still on the fence about it and I don't know if we're going to do it or not. I kind of want to chop this down a little bit lower, but that's just psychotic Alex thinking right now. >> You know, somebody recently asked me, they go, "What's your biggest screw up on a project?" Probably this right here. It's not the most expensive, but it's definitely the most annoying one where you have to…