Additionally, sanding helps the wood take the stain more evenly. The idea is to get the sides all smooth enough that the slide when you’re playing Jenga. It takes longer than you’d imagine! You could use a palm sander, but we enjoyed chitchat while sanding by hand. We even invited some friends over for pizza to help us.
Once they’re all cut, the fun part… sanding! I say the ‘fun’ part because this is what we did with the majority of our free time last week. When they’re all marked, go ahead and chop your 2×4 into 54 pieces! Make sure you have a sharp blade to cut down on the amount of splintering (and sanding!) you’ll have. So the measurement is 10.5 but your saw blade will take off a bit too, so try mark just outside your 10.5″ measurement along the boards. The tricky part is that 2x4s are not actually 2″ wide, they’re only 1.5″ wide. Since there are three 2x4s wide, they need to be cut to that length. Jenga towers are square if you look straight down at them. Start by marking out your two by fours a hair over 10.5″.
I’m hoping by giving you all of the tutorials in these two posts, that you won’t have to do a ton of digging around the web to do the same. It’s safe to say we’re loving these DIY yard games! Since making them last week (*ahem, finishing them right before our barbecue*), Shane’s work has already called dibs on them for their summer work party. So far we’ve made five but we have plans to make a few more later this summer as well. I decided that it had to happen as soon as we possibly could and when I mentioned it to Shane, he not only loved the idea but suggested we make a whole suite of DIY yard games. I’ve been dealing with some serious Pinterest envy over massive Jenga games and other back yard games for a while now. I’ve got Jenga, Dominoes, and Yahtzee today for you and next Monday I have Scoring Anagrams/Speed Scrabble and Cornhole! We had some of our family over to test out our new DIY Yard Games and I’m so excited to share them with you today! I’ve got five awesome giant yard games coming your way, and that’s a lot of tutorial talk, so I thought I’d split it into two posts. We actually came inside after a few hours because the kids weren’t used to the heat- it was that nice out. This weekend we hosted our first barbecue of the season (woohoo!) and the weather was SO beautiful.