The One Room Challenge Has Begun
I registered for the Spring/Summer 2020 One Room Challenge, and it starts… NOW. Pappas patio, get ready to be beautified, and just in time for warmer weather!
We’ve had such a crazy start to 2020, haven’t we? With our “shelter-in-place” and “stay at home” orders, no gathering in groups of 10 or more, and all family events cancelled or scaled wayyy down (I know of at least four weddings we were invited to that have already been postponed this year), we’re turning our focus toward our homes. All those projects we’ve been postponing or never even knew we wanted (or needed) to do until now are suddenly making their way to the top of our to-do lists because We. Are. Home. All. The. Time…
For us, with Joe being 15 months old and wanting to be “ahsiye” (outside) all day, every day, we’ve realized that our outdoor spaces needed some love. We moved into this house last year and were very “meh” about the sea of concrete the previous owners left us, but the views of the mountains did help balance that out.
To make us hate the concrete even more, Joe has fallen on it and scraped his hands, knees, and face one too many times. I promise we’re not bad parents. Joe simply isn’t one for having to hold hands while he’s playing; he loves his independence and hates when we’re right on his heels all the time. It’s also giving him—not us, him—gray hair! Something needs to be done about this danger zone.
I knew from participating in the Spring One Room Challenge (ORC) last year that if I had a hard deadline, Jason (my husband) would be more willing to help me complete the project on time, so I registered for the Spring/Summer 2020 ORC. I KNOW this is going to be a great before and after. Without further ado, here are my thoughts for our pergola/patio area.
In an effort to save money, we’re going to give our existing teak patio furniture that we bought three years ago a nice rub-down with some teak oil. As for the DIYs we have in store for the next few weekends, we’re going to paint the concrete floor (the part under the pergola) using Ace Clark and Kensington satin outdoor paint, and then we’ll stencil it using a pretty stencil pattern that is still TBD (I’m terrible at making these smaller decisions…). We’re also going to string some cafe lights that we already own underneath the pergola for ambiance, build some super-cool benches out of patio pavers and 4×4’s from our local Ace Hardware, and create a DIY version of what should look like a super expensive built-in grilling area—MEGA-HUGE thank-you to Rocky Mountain Ace Hardware for gifting us the Weber gas grill we’re going to use for this project!!! The blog post for that project is one I’m most excited and also most nervous to write, because we’re going to attempt a DIY we haven’t done before. I’m hopeful it’ll turn out perfectly, but there are a few what-ifs with that one. You’ll find out more soon! There are, of course, some additional DIYs that I want to keep a surprise until the big reveal, so stay tuned! I’ll share more of the specifics for each of these projects as we work on them over the course of the next six weeks. Until then, feast your eyes on some “before” pictures, and prepare to be wowed!
As I mentioned, Joe has fallen one too many times on this concrete, but we don’t have quite the budget to jackhammer the lower portion of the patio out and then restructure a lawn at the same height. Our house is built into a hill, so if we simply removed the concrete and poured grass seed or laid sod, we’d have a big drop from the pergola area to the yard. Even though our HOA has strict rules against landscaping with artificial grass, we’re going to just do it. I can’t stand seeing Joe with bumps and cuts after tripping and falling on this concrete, and believe it or not, we actually found a loophole in the HOA’s bylaws: Artificial grass, or turf, is only permitted in residential yards if it’s being installed as a putting green. That makes sense, as this is a golf neighborhood. Maybe the board members are too old to remember the toddler days, but hey, they appreciate a good putting green! So all we have to do is drop a hole in this area for practice putting, and we’re set! I’m not sure how solid this logic is, but we’re going with it. Here’s my crappy iPhone finger-drawn rendering of where we’re planning to put the turf…
Side note: I actually had my most expensive “when you give a mouse a cookie” moment with this project, too. Ready for this train of thought? My whacko mind said to itself, If we redo the patio but our house stays this puke-pink color, then what’s the point? We need to have our home’s exterior painted to better align with our style. It needs to be more neutral… white (“Swiss Coffee”), black (“Black Knight”), and griege (“Edgecomb Gray”). Somehow I got Jason on board with that one (maybe secretly he was over living in a pink house), and the painters just wrapped up today! I can’t wait to show you those before and after pictures, but we have a couple of DIYs we want to do prior to photographing this transformation. More details on this next week!
I think we’ll definitely be able to knock this out in the next six or seven weeks, and with our local Ace Hardware (the awesome team at Westwoods Ace!!) as our leading sponsor, trusted advice for anything we don’t already know or supplies for anything we don’t already have is only a two-minute drive from home! We are so very appreciative of their sponsorship and their guidance thus far on our patio project! Marcus, Josh, James, store manager Tim, and their Instagram manager Rachel have already been incredibly helpful—Jason and I were in the store almost every day for about a two-week period in April (Jason for landscaping tools and parts to fix our busted lawn irrigation system and me for getting seven different shades of black in Clark and Kensington paint samples and tweaking the recipes with Marcus until I found the perfect shade). Working in conjunction with our friends at Westwoods Ace Hardware, we’re confident this project is going to go smoothly and that we’ll finish on time for the big ORC reveal, which is June 25-July 1!