This patio set started as a truck bed full of free wood shipping pallets and turned into five separate pieces: a chevron-top dining table with two matching benches, a smaller accent table with a completely different four-way “pinwheel” chevron top, several straight-slat stools, and a two-tier plant stand. It’s the largest single build in the shop archive, and it shares the same mitered-chevron motif as a Chevron Coffee Table and a Chevron Outdoor Bench built around the same time.
What’s In the Set
The photos document five distinct pieces, all built from the same stack of broken-down pallets:
- A rectangular dining-height table with a chevron top: two mitered board-halves meeting at a straight center seam, the same layout used on the Chevron Coffee Table and Chevron Outdoor Bench.
- Two matching straight-slat benches sized to the dining table.
- A smaller square accent table with a four-way “pinwheel” chevron top, where the boards radiate out from the center toward all four sides instead of meeting at one seam, a different layout from the dining table’s chevron.
- Several straight-slat stools, built and finished in matching pairs.
- A two-tier plant stand, built from the same reclaimed stock.
Exact piece counts (how many stools ultimately shipped as part of the finished set) weren’t confirmed from the photos alone.
Sourcing the Material
Every piece in this set comes from broken-down wood shipping pallets. Several of the boards still carry a legible heat-treatment stamp, confirming genuine reclaimed pallet lumber rather than reclaimed lumber from an unknown source. The build starts with a truck bed loaded with whole pallets, broken apart board by board with a circular saw in the driveway.
The Chevron Dining Table
The larger table’s top is built the same way as the Chevron Coffee Table and Chevron Outdoor Bench: every board is mitered to a matching angle, and pairs from the left and right halves are glued together at a straight center seam running the length of the table. The tighter that seam, the cleaner the finished chevron reads; any gap at the point is obvious once the whole top is assembled.
Once the panel is complete and the legs are attached, the table gets a full sanding pass before it goes outside. The earlier photos show much more color variation and rougher surface texture between boards than the later, sanded shots.
The Straight-Slat Benches and Stools
The seating is deliberately plain by comparison: straight pallet slats screwed to a simple four-leg frame, with pocket-hole joinery visible in several of the build photos. Keeping the benches and stools plain puts all of the visual weight on the chevron tabletops rather than competing with them, the same design logic used on the trestle-leg Chevron Coffee Table.
The Pinwheel Chevron Accent Table
The smaller square accent table uses a completely different chevron layout than the dining table: instead of two halves meeting at one straight seam, the boards radiate outward from the center point toward all four sides of the tabletop, forming a four-way “pinwheel.” It’s a more involved cutting layout: every board needs a matching miter on both the inner and outer edge, but the payoff is a top with visual movement in every direction rather than a single line down the middle.
A Dramatic Alternate Finish: Torching + Tung Oil
At least two of the pinwheel accent tables got a noticeably different treatment than the rest of the set: the surface was torched before finishing, then finished with Watco Tung Oil. The torching darkens the softer grain unevenly, so the finished surface shows much higher contrast between light and dark grain lines than the naturally weathered, un-torched pieces. The same pinwheel layout reads almost like a different piece of furniture depending on which finish it got.
The rest of the set (the dining table, benches, and most of the stools) was left to weather naturally rather than torched, which is why the same reclaimed pallet material shows up in several different tones across the finished photos: pale sanded wood, warm amber, and weathered gray, alongside the deliberately dark torched-and-oiled pieces.
Materials & Tools
What’s confirmed directly from the build photos:
- Broken-down wood shipping pallets for every board in the set; a heat-treatment stamp is legible on several boards
- Wood glue and pin nails at the mitered chevron joints
- Pocket-hole jig and screws for the bench/stool slat tops
- Circular saw for breaking down pallets and cutting boards to length
- Table saw and miter saw for ripping boards and cutting the chevron angles
- Random-orbit sander for finish sanding
- A torch, for the dark-finish pinwheel accent tables
- Watco Tung Oil (one-step wipe-on finish) for the torched pieces
Exact dimensions, the specific finish schedule for the naturally weathered pieces, total board count, and cost weren’t captured in the photos.
The Complete Set
The finished photos show every piece grouped together on the back patio: both tables, the benches, and the stools, all sharing the same reclaimed material even across their different chevron layouts and finishes.
Related Projects
This set shares its chevron motif with a Chevron Coffee Table and a Chevron Outdoor Bench, and the same reclaimed-pallet material and technique are planned for a future Reclaimed Chevron Trash Can post. Together these form a running “chevron cluster” worth browsing as a group if you like this pattern.