I built the 8 Foot Picnic table off of Ana's plans but didn't do the greatest job following the full directions. I was going a little too fast. The area I most regret moving too quickly on was the legs. I neglected to look at the sketch of the table legs with dimensions close enough to see that the spread for the bottom of the legs should be 47-1/4" and that the top 2x4 should extend beyond the top of the leg by 3". I only looked at the note "meets at corner" and built the legs off that. The legs were thus, not uniform. The next error I made was not measuring my 2x6 boards to make sure they were equal. All were longer than 8' and none were the same length. When I started attaching the unmeasured, uncut boards to the table legs, I attempted to attach them per plan but ended up with a table slightly out of square. Overall though, I am generally happy with the table and will be donating it to my church. If I build more in the future, I will make sure to space my legs correctly.
I began by brushing on the deck stain. The next day I sanded the top of the table and seats with 60 grit sandpaper and then smoothed it with 120 grit. This evened out the stain and hid any brush strokes. I then wiped it down to remove the dust and coated it with Thompson's clear water seal.