Southern Seazons: Going, going, gone

Wednesday, July 2, 2014

Going, going, gone

The pergola is finally gone. Well most of it. I am not sure why they left the headers but I think they are going to use the posts. They were suppose to come on Saturday and do the demo but it got changed to Monday. Who thought that it would take 8 1/2 hours to demo. So needless to say that I did not get anything done that I planned to do that day. Our little dog gets stressed with loud noises so I had to stay away from home with him.

Here is all that I got done on my four day weekend.

First is the deck furniture. I was able to get it all painted in one day. I had six chairs and two tables. Here is one of the chairs showing the new cushions that I got for them. I don't want to put the cushions on until they go back up on the deck. I am going to go more with a tuscan theme for the deck so I thought these cushions would work the best.

Here is what the furniture looked like before. It was a green and black verdigris . I used the metallic oil rubbed bronze just like on the back porch furniture.

Now for the back yard. I can't seem to find a lot of the before pictures that I took but here is the northeast corner before. It was full of weeds and you can't tell where the grass ends.

Here it is now. I still have a few more plants to put in towards the back. There are a few rose bushes back there so I will add some more and I would like to put a butterfly bush in there also.

It looks much better don't you think. I planted about 38 plants between the front and the back yard. Next year I will add a few more in the back.

I got most of the flowers planted along the back fence. Here it is after the bushes and weeds were removed. At this point it looked 100% better.

Now for the after. Next year I will add more flowers to help fill it in. It is not easy having to remove rocks, landscape fabric and not to mention digging in clay soil.

The last project I completed was the $7.99 end table that I got at Goodwill. This will go on my back porch. Right now the porch is filled with all the furniture. Once the deck cover is done I can put it in place. Here is the before picture.

Now the after.

I did manage to get another project halfway done. That is my kitchen island. I bought these corbels from Goodwill about a month ago and thought about using them on my fireplace. They cost $3.99 each so I couldn't pass them up. After I brought them home I decided that they would look better on the kitchen island. So here they are.

I wasn't sure of how to attach them since they are made of plaster and I couldn't just drill a hole somewhere on them. I decided to hang them first. Not easy since I can't move the counter top. There was a small gap at the top so I used caulking. I had to brace them overnight and now they are solid. Next step is to get them painted dark brown to match the island. As I mentioned I got these for $3.99 each. I removed the price tag to see the original and it was $33.23. Can't beat that.