Trimming Boxwoods and Progress on the Back Deck

When last we left off with back deck, it looked like this. (Yeah, we lived with that astroturf for the past eight months. Yikes.) This post has a wider shot of the roughly 7x20' space. It's small, but there's plenty of room for a round table and chairs and a grill. So with the warmer weather enticing me with promises of barbeques in my near future, and my new shop-vac giving me the necessary boost of courage, I pulled that nasty astroturf up, scraped up the flaky glue and loosened concrete with a planing shovel and a wire bristle brush. Then in was time to vacuum.

Some of you guys had questions about shop-vacs since I mentioned mine in this post. They are very, very powerful vacuums that you can use to suck up anything - water, spilled paint, sand, sawdust, rocks - and the mess deposits into this big rolling bucket that you just dump out when you're done cleaning. But the filters are pretty basic, so I wouldn't recommend using them in your home for regular cleaning. They're almost too powerful for that. But they're amazing for messy outdoor projects. This is after literally one swipe of the shop-vac:

And here's what the floor looks like now. I scraped up as much of the glue as I could for now. We might still rent a wire brush drill bit to clean it up more, but the concrete is a little fragile, so we'll probably just skim right over everything with a fresh layer of concrete before I paint.

I also picked up some new boxwoods for the back deck recently. Two big ones for the matte black  planters I bought at Target last summer. And two smaller boxwoods for these new urns I picked up at Lowes last week. I love the chalky black finish!

I used my favorite pair of pruners to trim up the new plants. 

I rounded out the big ones and squared off the smaller ones. I'm hoping they fill out this spring so I can shape them a little more.

I love seeing the shot of green outside the doors in our living room. And I love that the green is not astroturf. :)

Vintage Lounge Chairs

My sister's in town and I was so happy to have her company for a last minute working road trip. We stopped to do some antiquing - and look what I found today!

These vintage wire lounge chairs have so much potential and they were a steal. I'm so glad I switched my balcony plans at the last minute and went with these Blu Dot chairs for around the table. These loungers will sit in a pair on the other end of the balcony. Maybe the faux bois side table between them?

I'm not a fan of the ecru paint color. It's chipping and rusted over a bit anyway, so I'm thinking I'll strip these down and see what I've got to work with. I'm sort of hoping I can leave the metal unpainted. (maybe just sealed to prevent rusting?).



I'm already brainstorming cushion designs. I have a really fun one in mind. I just need to do a little research on the type of foam/fill I need to buy for outdoor use. Have you ever made your own outdoor cushions?

New Balcony Chairs from Fab

Good news! I am working on a zinc table DIY for our balcony that I'm really excited about. Since I'm saving about $500 on that project, I felt okay about spending a little more on chairs.

I had plans to buy four vintage Bertoia chairs (or this new version), but it's true they aren't the most comfortable chairs out there (especially without the chair pads). So I decided to nix the idea, mostly because I thought something more on the solid side would look better with the tumbling block floor pattern.

I've always loved Blu Dot furniture (Jenna Lyons' pink desk is such a favorite.) And while I might have not picked these chairs on their own, the modern lines mix so well with traditional and other vintage styles. I can't wait to pair them with my zinc table.

Fab had the Blue Dot chairs on sale for about the same price as the Bertoia knock-offs I had been considering before. One of my friends has these on her balcony and they made for a very comfortable long dinner party. And of course, I'm crazy over the red color (though they come in other colors too if you're looking for something similar).

Even though I purchased the chairs myself, Fab is a sponsor of LGN and I'm happy to share some of the great products available on the site today. The Fab site is super fast-moving (the sales last 3-7 days) so when this stuff is gone, it's gone. A sad lesson I learned this week when the kantha quilt I loved sold. Never wait when it's true love! :) Luckily, there are plenty of beautiful quilts left here.

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Getting Ready for Late Summer Garden Parties

This post is brought to you by Nestle Toll House Birthday Sugar Cookies. Bake some birthday love.

I have some good news to report! We're about four days into the Great Sod-Laying Experiment, and so far, the sod looks to be thriving. Not much yellowing or wilting. I'm so relieved because we have a playhouse to install!

It's much cuter in person, though (and I'm sure you already guessed this) I'll be painting it. :) The second the sod is ready, we'll be moving the playhouse to it's spot in the yard, which is good because we had some plans this weekend!

Before it gets too cold, we thought it would be fun to have some people over. This weekend we're going to be throwing a very small and pretty simple birthday party for some of our friend's kids (mostly girls). There will be an equal number of adults at the party, so there needs to be a little bit of something for everyone. I'm still in the planning phase, which is not good considering the party's in just a couple days. But here's what I have so far and I'm sure the rest will sort of create itself while we're in the moment.

My girls have been on a flower crown-making kick this summer, so I thought it would be fun for them to teach their friends how to make crowns at the party. Nothing says garden party like little girls running around in flower crowns!

We're going with a late summer/early fall-feeling color palate: peach, coral, mustard, burgundy, black and cream. Maybe a little mint for good measure (though that might show up on the playhouse dutch door!). I'm thinking I'll make a couple strands of garlands to help soften the unfortunate bare wood fence situation. I want to keep the food really simple - just desserts. Probably cookies with homemade ice cream. And maybe some cute milk jars?

Have you seen any really cute, relatively easy party ideas around the web lately? I've started a Pinterest board with some of my ideas. I'll be adding to it this weekend, if you want to follow along. I'm off to go buy more seating!

Our Quick and Easy Outdoor Lighting

This post is part of an ongoing series presented by Lowe's. Never Stop Improving. 

We're making some progress on the back yard!

But first, I still get a lot of questions about our renting/renovating situation here at the brownstone, so I thought I'd clarify again.

I'm sure you can imagine how expensive it is to own a home here in New York City. The prices are crazy, as well as the maintenance fees and taxes. We would love to own a home some day soon and are saving to make that a possibility, but for the next few years or so, we're feeling really lucky that we found a comfortable house in a great neighborhood, with a landlord that lets us do whatever we want.

He's giving us a break on rent in exchange for fixing and updating the home and he's paying for a lot of the renovation work we're doing. There was a long list of projects made before we moved in that the landlord agreed to fully pay for, and the things above and beyond that, we can approach him with separately. So far he's been willing to cover most of the things we felt like were his responsibility. Then there have been other random things that he doesn't care about that we've had to pay for ourselves (like refinishing the floors - which we ended up not doing. Sad, I know). We knew that would be the case though, so we don't mind still taking on many of these projects. We'll just do them for the least amount of money as possible!

The landlord is not too anxious to put money into the yard (understandably), so we're paying for everything there. I mentioned earlier this week that we don't have any lighting in the backyard. I've ordered some globe string lights for the upper and bottom decks (hopefully they'll come next week), but I also wanted something a little brighter for the upper deck.

I found these outdoor grade (which is important to have for this project) clamp lights and extension cord at the hardware store. The largest size clamp light was only $7, so I bought three.

I took off the bowl shades and spray painted them with this really pretty Rustoleum enamel called Glacier Ice. It's a soft bluey green-gray. (how's that for a description?)

I just did the outside of the bowls because I wanted to leave the inside the reflective chrome. I love how the color is so vintage looking!

At the same time I spray painted a couple of pieces of scrap wood I had left over from the bookshelf project we did this week (pictures coming soon!!), that I cut to be about 2x3. The total length with the two pieces was about 125". I sprayed the wood and some metal L-brackets with a flat black enamel.

When those were dry, we evenly spaced and screwed the L-brackets to the wood.

We drilled some pilot holes into the brick using a masonry bit and then hung the wood on the brackets using anchors and masonry screws.

Once the ledge was installed, we just clamped on the three lights. Part of the reasoning behind using a deeper piece of wood as the ledge to clamp the lights to, was so we could hide the cords easily.

I did end up putting a handful of staples down to keep some of the cords in place, but for the most part, the system is completely moveable, so if we ever want to take down the lights it would be super simple.

Here's the view from the ground. Pretty clean!

The back doors are not centered on the building, so the lights don't line up with the door, but it doesn't really bother me. I'd rather have the lights more closely centered on the house.

We ended up sort of splitting the difference.

We used the lights for the first time last night and they worked great! We even pushed the lamp heads up to have more light out in the back of the yard.

I'm so excited to get the string lights too. I think the two will look so pretty together!

We might be ready to do something different by next spring, but for about $30 in supplies, I think this was a great solution for us right now.

The Balcony Floor

With Labor Day right around the corner, we are trying to get the back yard in a better place so we can enjoy the last couple weeks of great weather. We're really anxious to get a grill out on the balcony for some end-of-summer barbecues! But right now, the balcony is anything but welcoming. There's no lighting out there, so the party ends fast when the sun goes down, and worse, the ground is covered in decades-old astroturf.

I pulled back the astroturf today and the situation under the ugly astroturf was just gross. Lots of old and chipped glue.

I scraped up some of glue and a lot of it came off after only a couple minutes of work. I think I'll buy a better scraper and maybe rent a wire brush grinder and see where we sit.

I've been looking into different types of concrete filler/resurfacing products and it looks like getting a cheap and easy-to-mix bag of thin set is a good way to go. I'm not necessarily after a perfectly new floor, just something a little cleaner and more smooth... because I have a little floor painting idea that I just can't get out of my brain...

Zinc Table

If we get this new place, for the first time in many years we will have a house with private outdoor space. Hallelujah! It's not huge a huge garden, but it just enough room for the kids to run around and for an outdoor dining/bbq area.

It's taking just about every ounce of self control I have to not buy this zinc table for the deck. I really love it.

There are going to be so many big purchases for the move, I'll have to do some prioritizing. So I guess we'll hold out for a little while longer (and hope that it goes on sale in the meantime?). I am going to check out some vintage Bertoia chairs from craigslist tomorrow though. Wouldn't these make a pretty amazing pair with the zinc table? If the finish is bad, there might be some spray paint action up in here.

And while we're at it I'd like a few strands of these classic string lights. These more modern string lights are cool too.

Have you seen any great outdoor furniture or accessories this year? I'm so excited about having a yard again, I can hardly stand it.