Why do I let my wife talk me into building things, when it would be easier to just buy them? Case in point, we could use a new picnic table. Our old one had outlived its usefullness a few years ago. So here we go out looking at picnic tables. Everywhere we went she couldn't find anything that would look good beside our new grill. Then we get to this little out of the way place where she finally sees one picnic table that is CUTE. Cute maybe, but not three hundred and fifty dollers cute. She quickly turns to me and asks "couldn't you build one like that"? By this time I am so ready just to go home, I say "sure, why not"? Now you must realize that I have a bunch of treated lumber at home that has been set aside for another project later this summer, so the materials wasn't going to be a problem. So I pull out my cell phone to take a few pictures of the CUTE table, and off to home we go. Here lyes the trouble. Before we get home she decides that she would rather have the top looks like this and the benches looks like that and the sides to look like something else, and she wants it to be three toned. Once I got home I drew her ideas out on paper and believe me it looks nothing like the CUTE table we saw just an hour before. I now have the benchs built. I did the benchs first because they will be easier to do then the top. So whats the big deal you ask? For each bench I had to cut and stain 93 seperate pieces of wood, just to get the basket woven look she wants. I haven't even came up with a number for the tabletop yet, but I bet it will be over 400 pieces of wood that will be needed to be cut and stained. Granted this table is turning out to be beautiful but it would be nice to put this much work into something that we are going to be using more the four or five times a year.