DIY Cedar Railing Bar (How-to Video & Free Plans)

This DIY Cedar Railing Bar is the perfect way to enhance your outdoor living space, especially if you’ve got a deck that’s a little on the smaller side and maybe you don’t have an eating area that’s big enough for a full table.

We’ve kept this bar portable and light, with a really simple design. The project is 5 easy steps,  with all square cuts we’re gonna set the um the actual countertop portion 36 inches off the ground we’re gonna have an eight inch backsplash so that bottles and stuff don’t fall off the back of it so that’s a safety feature and we’re trying to keep it really simple everything’s a square cut it’s a really really simple project and of course we’re going to use western red cedar for this project because nothing looks feels or smells quite like western red cedar that’s right plus it’s an easy build we’re going to do this in five easy steps we’ve already cut the wood as you mentioned what’s step two step two is to make the backsplash hook portion okay let’s get started

now for this project we’re using a beautiful naughty grade of western red cedar which is really going to add a lot of warmth and texture to the project plus it’s cost effective now for dimensions what are we doing jim we’ve got one two by eight a couple two by fours but the majority of this project is two by six we love two by six cedar we use a lot for our exterior projects because it just scales well for that sort of project we use tons and tons of it for decks we’re just really it’s really our go-to nice and also western red cedar is naturally resistant to raw decay and insects making it ideal for all your outdoor projects so how do we do this well cedar’s beautiful so i don’t want to see a bunch of screw holes on this project it’s just that kind of project so we’re going to take this a step further and you’re going to see me drilling a bunch of half inch holes in all this wood and essentially it’s a pre-drill for the screw so i drill these holes i put the screw in and then later on in the interest of efficiency we’re going to plug all those holes with little cedar plugs sand them off and you won’t be able to see the screws so that’s what i’m going to start with drilling these holes okay

okay so here we go our 2×8 the top our 2×6 selected for a nice face that’s the front of the backsplash and then that’s the back hook the 2×4 in the interest of making this easy we’re going to use this piece of 2×6 to kind of support the 2×8 while we get it attached to the front we do want some glue here we’re going to put some a little bit of glue on here yeah just do it once

for the front one the other one again is just false work so it just sits there

so we want to take this up want to put this on and you want a half inch reveal over the front so you kind of set it up like that it’s pretty good i want to be flush on the end and then we want that half inch reveal on the front

there’s a half inch and now i’m just going to stick i’m going to put this in right now just in the interest of making it easier so here goes this one

and again our half inch holes kind of pile it for these screws which is kind of just an added bonus then we go down here we’re pretty close

can you hold that can i push down on it a bit that’s perfect right there okay so this is designed to go on a three inch railing and the railing is exactly three inches so what we’re going to do is we’re going to give it about an eighth of an inch we’re also not going to glue this piece just in case we had to adjust it for say another railing system or you know you wanted to take it to a buddy’s place or something so we’re gonna do that three in an eighth

three and an eight and an eight isn’t a lot of slop in a situation like this it just gives you a bit of wiggle room so then we’re going to go like this take this put that on flush up with the end again

okay sarah and i have packed it together on either end with angle screws now we’re going to put it on its side and put in all the face screws and that’ll cinch her right up

nice so what’s the next step next step we’ll move this back and then we’re going to work on the frame for the countertop okay okay so here we go these are the cleats and the ends roughly i’ll put them roughly in their spots we’ve pre-marked the front so we know where they go there you go now we’re going to screw them into place

okay so now i’m going to this front face which is going to be visible i’m going to screw it to these blocks we’re going to go back to using glue and i’ll get right on that and for more detailed instructions you can go to realceder.com for free downloadable building plans

perfect okay so the frames together and now we’re going to these boards that we used down here for uh to support the frame while we’re working it are actually the countertop so we’ve selected it for the side that we want to look look at to be down so we’re going to um move this around and start fastening it from this side and what kind of fasteners are we using we’re using stainless steel because they’re non-corrosive and in this case we’re using three inch screws

so we’ve attached the front board of the top now we’re going to attach the second board in the same sort of manner we want to make sure that it’s flush on both ends obviously we also want to uh we’re going to use this nail to keep it about an eighth apart and that’s just so stuff can drain through it can kind of breathe all that so you just want an eighth inch all along just using it as a spacer it’s a spacer yeah

good how are you pretty pretty flush okay so i’m just going to throw a three inch screw on each end in a toenail situation and then i just put three two inch screws along this side on the back side so nothing will show so this is the last three inch

there we go now it’s very very stable now we’re going to take this top lift it up and put it on here and put it together and then basically the bulk of it is done

okay here we go okay

so now we’re just attaching these two components yes we are so here we go keeping in mind everything’s upside down so we go like that now we’re going to shim it up or temporarily hold it like this

okay put it down and we want to okay so here we go so now i’m going to it’s pretty straight everything’s pretty good i’m going to put a tack here and attack here two screws and then i’m going to go along and start screwing these down and this in in a in a kind of a order that i’m determining based on what needs to be kind of straightened up

okay so lots of screws there’s a lot of timber here so you just want to make sure it’s real real strong so now we’re gonna we’re gonna turn this over and have a look at the other side

wow it’s really coming along beautifully yeah it’s because it’s western red cedar it’s easy to work with the it’s straight and stable surprisingly lightweight and the tools love it

what do we need to know here okay so we’re gonna put we’ve we’re gonna fill all these holes now so what i’ve done is i’ve bought a plug cutter you can buy them at your hardware store this thing is a half inch plug cutter i had half inch spade bit which which i made these holes so then i took this plug cutter first i found the end cut of this piece of wood so that the color would match which is this and the pinky you got it and the end cut of the front which is that yes and then i do this

so um i’ve drilled a whole bunch of them the ones we’ll need and then now we’re going to take this chisel and snap them out

okay here’s the plug that we’ve harvested it’s usually enough for two or three so i usually just take them and bang them in half just to make them go longer i’m gonna break i’m gonna keep them separated as per the color because the different tonal range and then we’re gonna put them in that’s our next step so next step just get some glue

we’re going to dip it in the glue lots of glue then you’re going to line the grain up you can see the grain on that line it up so it’s going the same way as this these are just kind of general rules on plugs and then you put it in and we’ll just leave it to dry

okay last thing to do before it goes off to site to be installed is to take care of these plugs so we’ve let them dry for about 20 minutes number of ways to deal with these there’s kind of easy carpenter ways if you have a belt sander handy there’s a kind of the old school way where we would pair this down

like that and then just take a sander to that or like i say with something like this

we just work our way along doing that

let’s flip it down

ah looks great it does and not only does western red cedar look great but it’s actually a green choice in fact woods such as western red cedar are far more environmentally friendly to manufacture than other building materials so it’s a choice you can feel good about that’s great so let’s get these legs on and install this okay so we’ve got the bar top at the site where the homeowners want it now in terms of installation it can be quite site specific is that right jim it can it’s built to go over any railing it’s adaptable for that it’s been we designed it to go over this particular top rail but what we didn’t anticipate when we were back in the shop is that this railing is at a level so it’s following the deck that’s pretty common application too you’re going to find that so what we’re going to do the first thing we’re going to do is shim this level because it’ll just it’s just a better situation if it’s level so there you see it’s out you see i cut a shim before so it’s level to the railing now yeah and it’s hanging on the railing so it’s not going anywhere right so now what we want to do is the legs are going to be um different lengths because of course this is level now but the deck isn’t it’s got lots of slope which we like on a deck so what we’re going to do we’re going to take this like that we’re going to lift this up to level and then we take a measurement here down to the deck we’ve already done it yeah so i’ll show you what’s going to happen we’ve done it on both sides exactly so now we have the leg sitting here measured specifically to lend they you know one’s an inch longer than the other one because of the slope of the deck they’re quite thick legs because here we’re dealing with uh one that these clients are going to use it for sure a lot there’s a big wind factor here they they lose barbecues off the deck and everything so we just want to make sure that everything’s really solid and also the railing is a fairly light duty railing real light duty residential railing so you know we want to make sure that a lot of the weight is just going down through these legs

we’re not going to screw it into the deck obviously because it’s a waterproof surface but this will do just fine go okay so on to the next one okay so this because we’re against the post here it’s a you know it’s a it’s its own site so we’ve cut a first post to go in here just to kind of hold our other post off it’ll become clear once we put it in so that’s the little post and it’s sitting on this skirt right here

it is perfect you gotta like that okay

and that’s enough to hold it we’re just gonna put this post in just for aesthetics just to kind of make it look better so it matches the other side

oh my god jim it looks amazing oh that it does beautiful care to saddle up to the bar with you here there we go beautiful oh the homeowners are gonna love this bar how perfect is it you