Outdoor Dining Tables

There is a huge range of outdoor dining tables. You can get them as huge rustic solid oaken tables, beautiful teak tables, wicker tables, aluminium tables, folding and stacking tables. The world's favourite garden furniture is white stackable plastic. This garden furniture is light enough to be moved easily and can be used indoors in an emergency too. The one thing that all outdoor dining tables have to be able to do is stand up to all types of weather.

Outdoor Dining Tables

Outdoor dining tables allow you to make full use of your garden or patio, especially in the spring, summer and autumn. Everybody would like to have beautiful solid oak or teak garden furniture but they are extremely expensive to buy.

Outdoor dining tables can be rectangular, hexagonal or round and made from natural wood, wicker, plastic, glass or metal like aluminium or wrought iron.

Although a natural, solid wood outdoor dining set is expensive to buy, it is cheaper in the long term. Natural solid oak or teak outdoor dining tables will last for twenty or thirty years, if maintained properly, whereas plastic furniture will need to be replaced every five to ten years. Solid timber garden furniture is the most beautiful and is too heavy to steal, so it is meant to be left outdoors in all weathers.

This means that it has to be treated at least once a year. A teak dining table should be oiled and oak should be varnished. A patio dining table and chair set can be sheeted over in the winter to shield it from the worst of the weather, although you have to leave the covering loose enough to allow air to circulate otherwise  the timber will start to rot.

If you buy wooden outdoor dining tables it is best to buy tables with narrow gaps between the slats to allow condensation from cold glasses and bottles to drip through, otherwise you will get puddles of water on the table, which is a nuisance if you are reading a book or the paper.

If space is limited, you may not be able to have a permanent, massive outdoor dining set, so you will have to settle for stackable furniture. The main problem with this type of lawn and garden furniture is that you need a shed to lock it up in or it may be stolen.

An advantage of stackable, light-weight lawn and garden furniture is that you can put it on the roof rack and take it camping or on a picnic with you.

The most common type of stackable outdoor dining tables and chairs are white plastic, but you can also get folding aluminium and wooden garden and outdoor patio furniture. Of these three types, moulded plastic is the most comfortable, but a lot of it does allow water to puddle.

Plastic also deteriorates if subject to extremes of heat and cold. The plastic goes very brittle and can snap without warning, which can be dangerous. There is very little maintenance with plastic outdoor dining tables and chairs. You should wash them down from time to time with warm soapy water and check them for reliability, especially if someone heavy is visiting.

A plastic chair gave way under me once and I had a bad back for a month. Outdoor dining tables are not subject to such weight and so should last a lot longer than the chairs.