When they’re all marked, go ahead and chop your 2×4 into 54 pieces!

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 also hope by putting it all in one spot for you that you’ll only need to take one trip to Home Depot to get everything you need (I may or may not have had to go back once or twice to get it right). And that’s an accomplishment when you have 100 Scrabble tiles to paint (yep, there’s 100!). All of these games are sealed (I’ll tell you which I chose and why), all of these tutorials have measurements, and I even managed to snap photos of some of the steps. That means we NEED to seal our wood if we want it to last. We are building shelves on the outside back of our shed and want to store our games outdoors. There’s about 100 tutorials on giant Jenga- but only one I found recommended a sealer for the wood. It took a lot of research to find all the information to make these games! If you’d like to have 13 DIY yard games all in one spot- I also have a book! You can find that here. 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.

Shot jenga