Outdoor Oasis: Patio Room Ready for Summer

Ahhhhhh, our outdoor living room is nearly complete and we're lovin' it. Over Memorial Day weekend we added some homey touches like tiki torches, new container plantings & cafe-style string lights.

We went with Martha's Pacifica Collection for Home Depot & couldn't be happier with it. It's an amazing bargain (even more so now than when we bought ours; they've recently lowered the price)! The set is well-made, extremely comfortable to sit in, light & easy to move. Plus, the pieces are slightly smaller than most patio sets, which was important for our small space.

My favorite new container is our old mailbox! Cute, huh?

We love relaxing out here at night, listening to the toads at our little pond croaking (very loudly - kinda embarrassing!). Simple joys!

Check out my Flickr set for all the pics of our outdoor room renovation. What are your simple joys of summer? I'd love to hear about them!

{update 6/14/10: our patio is featured on Apartment Therapy! so exciting! Big thanks to Adrienne for the feature.}

New Metal Roof on our Patio!

Weekend before last Patrick finished installing a new cover on our back patio. It's made of sheet metal & it looks awesome!

before:

The original cover was made of corrugated plastic that was yellowed & unattractive. Plus, the gutters were no longer doing their job, so the fascia board on the house was rotted out & in need of repair. You can see all the gory details in my outdoor room set on Flickr, if you're so inclined.

after:

We've got it set up with our lovely patio furniture now, too, so we're well on our way to creating our outdoor living room. More pictures coming soon...

What about you? Do you have an outdoor living space, or do you prefer to spend your down time indoors?

Outdoor Oasis: Finished Brick Patio

Our patio extension has been finished since early November, but I'm just now getting around to posting about it. My super-handy husband, Patrick, did all of the hard work himself, and I think he did a fabulous job! He used unwanted antique Chicago bricks from a local contractor, found via Craig's List. In this photo, he hadn't yet filled in all the gaps around the patio's edge, but that's done now.

Here's how this area looked when we first bought the house, just over a year ago:

We've made quite a few changes in addition to the new patio:

• replaced the windows (as well as those on the rest of the house)
• sledge-hammered away those humongous rocks around the pond so that it's more integrated into the landscape & less Flintstones-y
• painted the inside of the pond black so that it almost disappears & looks more like a real pond & less like a teeny-tiny swimming pool
• removed those mind-bogglingly random pavers from around the pond & re-purposed them in other parts of the yard: the small square ones are now flower bed edging, placed on end & buried deep so that only a few inches of each are visible (it looks really good!), and the others were used to build a retaining wall for our compost piles
• created the little rock bed with cacti cuttings from my parents' yard & our suspended flower pots (which are now empty save for one - some replanting is definitely in order!)
  
• covered the ground with weed-blocking cloth & crushed granite gravel to create garden paths between our flower beds
  

We designed the patio together (of course I helped out with that - that's the fun part!), but Patrick did most of the work. I did help with the loading & unloading of all of those bricks when we got them from the contractor's site - 700 bricks! That's a lot of bricks. I didn't help much after that, though.

Patrick poured a foundation of gravel and sand and tamped it down, then laid each brick by hand (which ended up being even more than 700; he had to order more).

The last step was the coolest: sweeping sand across the bricks to fill in the gaps. It was mesmerizing to watch. I even swept a section myself; it was oddly satisfying. You start with a pile of sand, then sweep it across the bricks and it falls in between them, neatly filling in all of the spaces and leaving the tops of the bricks clean. I loved that step!

Of course I mostly love that our patio is all finished now. It looks amazing, especially with the shiny new grill we got as a Christmas gift! We've been using it a lot already, and can't wait for it to warm up so we can have friends over & enjoy being out there.

Next step in creating our Outdoor Oasis: converting that boring covered slab into a relaxing and beautiful outdoor living room! Stay tuned...

"Any Monkey Can Lay Pavers..."

"... it's the prep-work that takes some thinking & planning," says Patrick.


Well, keep up the good work, monkey; we need this patio finished by Thanksgiving! ; )

Kitchen Cabinet Remodel!

Welcome to the kitchen of the little old house I share with my sweet husband, Patrick, & our crazy cat, Pooky. We love old houses - they're full of charm & interesting details that you often don't find in new houses, like built-in hutches & bookshelves (I adore built-ins!). Our house was built in 1955 and has undergone pretty extensive remodeling (by previous owners), that has brought it up-to-date while still maintaining most of the home's architectural integrity.

The kitchen is really cute, with large windows & a new island in place of the original wall that has since been removed, making the kitchen a lot more spacious & open. I like spacious & open. I also like lots of cabinets, which our kitchen has. There are some things about these cabinets that I really dislike, however.

For instance, the layers of glossy white paint covering every surface of each cabinet are quite annoying. When you reach for a glass, you have to actually tug at it because it will have stuck to the paint on the shelf! ick. The painted surfaces also ensure that the big solid wood doors on the cabinets do not shut properly and often hang open slightly. Or if they do shut all the way, then you have to pull extra hard to dislodge them from the overly-painted surfaces.


And then there are the lovely extras left behind from pre-cellphone days, which you can see hiding behind the glasses there.

So, we've been wanting to do something about these cabinets for a while, and this past weekend we got started on it. All of my wishful gazing at beautiful kitchens in magazines & on blogs inspired me to do a low-cost, high-impact remodel of our wacky cabinets.

First off, Patrick removed the cabinet doors & I gleefully set them aside. Then I removed all of our dishes & he yanked out that telephone wire...























So what did we do next? What's our big plan for this little kitchen? Stay tuned...