Ask This Old House S24E25: The 17-Year-Old Picnic Table Rebuild, Home Insurance Basics, and Outdoor Movie Night Gear

Season 24, episode 25 of Ask This Old House puts a picnic table, a pile of outdoor movie gear, and a homeowner's insurance policy in the same half hour. Three different kinds of longevity problem: a table that already proved itself for 15-plus years, electronics expected to sit outside 24/7, and paperwork you hope never gets tested at all.

Tom Silva rebuilds the barn picnic table, 17 years later

Kevin recognizes the table the moment Tom pulls it out. They built it together at the barn, and Tom guesses it's been 15 or 16 years. The original was conventional kiln-dried lumber, left completely unfinished. No stain, no paint, no sealer. The top has gone gray and a third of the boards are worse for wear, but the pressure-treated legs held up fine.

That split is the whole lesson. Tom says he wouldn't want to use pressure-treated lumber on a surface you eat off of, at least for the first three or four months while it dries out. So the top was always going to be untreated stock, and untreated stock outside means you accept some weathering. Sixteen years of it, apparently, is an acceptable return.

The rebuild keeps the shape and changes the details. Seat boards go from 2x6 to 2x8, which widens the bench. Three 2x4 cleats hold the top together, one at center and two about 16 inches in from the ends. Tom finds the centerline by measuring to 48 1/4 on the 8-foot boards (they run long), marking the 2x4's 3 1/2-inch width in half, an inch and three-quarters to each side.

Assembly is exterior construction adhesive plus framing screws. Tom notes the adhesive cures faster on damp wood, which is a small gift when you're working outside. The screws are self-drilling with a coarse thread and a tip that cores the hole, so no pilot bit needed. A track saw squares the ends afterward.

The leg angle gets the most attention, and rightly so. Tom works in a 20-to-30-degree range. The original table used 28 degrees. This one gets 25. Wider stance means more resistance to tipping when four people sit down and shift around. He also keeps the seat edge set back about 4 inches from the top edge so you can actually swing your legs in and out.

Getting the height right on an angled leg is where the geometry shows up. Tom sets the table at 30 inches and the finished bench at 17 inches from the ground. He works off a level line on the ground and a level line under the top, makes parallel 25-degree cuts, then drops 1 1/2 inches for the thickness of the top using the width of his framing square as the gauge. Two carriage bolts per leg stiffen the A-frames.

Then the finish question, which is the quiet punchline. The original lasted over a decade and a half with nothing on it. Stain or paint might buy extra life, but Tom puts the recoating cycle at roughly every five years. Kevin's summary lands it: a little extra life, a lot more work. They leave it bare.

What the edit skips is the tedium. Two A-frames cut to matching angles, four carriage bolts drilled through, the top flipped and squared, a light sanding at the end. Kevin did real work here, marking and cutting to Tom's numbers. If you keep a Helper Scorecard through this season, this is a stronger outing than the episodes where he mostly holds the tape.

The practical read for a homeowner: this is a weekend project, not an afternoon one, and the angled legs are where people go wrong. You can absolutely build a version with square legs and a braced base, but if you're copying Tom's design, the cuts have to be parallel and the heights have to be measured off plumb lines, not eyeballed.

Ross Trethewey's outdoor movie night, minus the cord run

Ross sets up a projector that can live indoors or out, connects over Bluetooth or Wi-Fi, and pulls video straight from a phone or a smart-home platform. The old assumption that you had to hang an outdoor-rated TV on the siding is fading, and the side of the house becomes a screen if you want it to.

Power is the part that usually kills these setups, so Ross brings a lithium-ion battery bank. Around 1,000 watt-hours of storage, with 120-volt receptacles, USB ports, and 12-volt DC output. There's a solar input too, which matters more for camping and RV use than for a patio, but it's there. The math he gives is clean: the projector draws about 90 watts, so a full bank runs it for over 10 hours. Long enough for the game, and long enough that Kevin jokes they'll both be asleep before the credits.

Smart outdoor plugs handle the lighting and scheduling side. The unit Ross shows is weatherproof, offers two controlled outlets, and lets you set separate schedules for each one. Christmas lights on one, projector on the other, no timer dial to reset after a power flicker. This is the same instinct Ross brought to a pair of 1999 chain-drive garage openers earlier this season, where the point was adding control without throwing out working hardware. That recap lives at /posts/ask-this-old-house-season-24-episode-22-flower-vase-smart-garage-opener if you want the longer version.

The speaker conversation is where Ross gets genuinely useful for anybody buying outdoor electronics. Two options: a portable unit that charges indoors and then travels outside, and a permanently wired outdoor speaker that gets mounted to the house. The portable one connects back to the projector over Bluetooth or Wi-Fi for audio. The permanent one is the one that has to survive weather, and that's where IP ratings come in.

Ingress protection is two numbers. The first covers dust on a 0-to-6 scale. The second covers water on a 0-to-9 scale. Ross shows an IP-66 speaker and an IP-56 speaker, and the practical difference is how much dust and water they'll tolerate. Both can be hosed off. He also flags UV resistance, which is the failure mode nobody thinks about until a plastic housing has been in direct sun for three summers and gone chalky.

Two things the segment doesn't dwell on. A permanently wired outdoor speaker needs a wire run, and that's a real job with decisions about where it enters the house and how it's protected. And any outdoor electronics purchase should start with the IP rating on the box, not the price. Kevin's line about being over on Sunday at 2:00 is the correct response to all of it.

What a homeowner's policy actually covers

Kevin sits down with Angela, a licensed insurance agent, to walk through the anatomy of a standard policy. It splits into two halves: property and liability.

Property has four parts. Dwelling is the house itself. Other structures covers anything not attached, so a detached garage, a shed, a fence. Personal property is what's inside. Kevin's test for it is good: flip the house upside down and everything that falls out is personal property, while the built-in bookcase stays put. Loss of use covers the extra cost of living somewhere else if a covered claim makes the house unlivable for a stretch, which is the coverage people forget exists until they need a hotel for six weeks.

Liability has two parts. Personal liability carries the big numbers, often $500,000 or $1 million, because it's there to cover legal fees and judgments if you're sued over injury or property damage. Medical payments is much smaller, around $5,000, and it's no-fault. If a guest trips on an untied shoelace and goes to the hospital, that's the coverage Angela means.

Then the gaps, which is the useful half of the conversation. Endorsements are add-ons to a standard policy. Angela's New England example is escaped fuel remediation for a basement oil tank, since a slow drip onto a concrete floor turns into an environmental cleanup. Her California example is earthquake coverage. Neither is in a base policy.

On jewelry, Kevin mentions putting his wife's rings on the homeowner's policy years ago. Angela confirms you can do that through an endorsement but recommends against it. A claim on the homeowner's policy can follow the policy and affect it. A separate jewelry policy keeps that claim off the house record.

Water is where most people get surprised. Weather-driven water coming into the house from outside, through doorways or up through floors, is not covered by a standard policy and needs a separate flood policy. A burst pipe inside is a different situation and is covered. Sewer backup in a basement may need a water-backup endorsement before it's covered at all.

Angela's closing advice is to review the policy with your agent and then have someone else look at it too. That second set of eyes is the same logic behind vetting a contractor through licensing and insurance checks rather than taking a handshake at face value, which came up in the S24E23 lawn and walkway episode and still holds here: /posts/ask-this-old-house-season-24-episode-23-paver-walkway-lawn-mowing-contractor-vetting. Coverage gaps are cheap to find in April and expensive to find in November.

DIY Confidence Scale

• Picnic table rebuild: 5/10. The cutting is basic. The angled legs, the 30-inch and 17-inch heights, and keeping parallel cuts parallel are where a rushed job shows up two summers later as a wobble.
• Outdoor movie setup: 3/10 for the plug-and-play parts, which is most of it. Mounting a permanent wired speaker and running that wire is a different score.
• Reviewing your insurance policy: 1/10 on effort, 10/10 on consequence. Read it with your agent, then read it again with someone who isn't selling you the policy.

Additional Resources

• Watch on PBS
• Official This Old House episode page

Sixteen years out of untreated lumber and no finish is a durability argument Tom didn't have to make with words. Which of your outdoor builds has actually earned its paint, and which one has been coasting on bare wood all along?