A temporary, but pretty, tabletop

Here are a few things I've learned in the last week:

1. Living near a large, damn near freezing lake (seriously the water temperature off our house is 56 degrees today), has its benefits when it's amazing hot outside (but it's still plenty hot).
2. Detroit is not a good place to get stuck overnight whilst flying (in hindsight, I should have foregone the airline-provided hotel and just stayed in the airport. It was much nicer).
3. I am officially the worst blogger of before-and-afters ever. In my defense, however, that's because I'm so anxious to get going on a project that I forget to take a picture of the before.

That brings me to a little project I pulled off a week or two ago with not a lot of effort. Normally I'd just skip telling you about it giving the lack of before and during pictures, but it actually turned out pretty neat so I'm going to do it anyway. Plus, it's nothing hard it doesn't require a lot of explanation.

Three or so year ago we bought a patio set that included a tiled table. Because we're a little light on storage space, we've been leaving it out all winter, usually covered by a tarp. Apparently that's not so good for a tile-topped table because the tiles started popping off a couple years ago. We just glued them back on but then they'd pop off again. This year the table just started disintegrating to the point where we could pull the tiles off by hand.

I really didn't feel like looking for a new patio set in the beginning of summer (when selection is not at its best and prices are are their highest), nor was that in this year's budget, so we needed to come up with an interim solution. We first tried to take all the tiles off and hopefully just sand the top, but the top was made up of some kind of plasticlike material that couldn't be messed with.

Instead, we bought a half sheet of plywood and had it cut in half to the 48-inch width of the original table. Mr. Much More Patient took the jigsaw to it to get it back into a circular shape and then sanded the edges to round them a bit. We used birch plywood, but they were all pretty much the same price and I think anything would have worked for this purpose.

With the shape defined, the finishing department (that would be me) took over. I sanded the entire thing, both sides with 120-grit then 220-grit sandpaper and primed both sides. This was another spray-paint only project for me (mostly to save time, but also some money because I certainly didn't need an entire quart of paint for this project). The idea with priming the underside of the table was to give it a bit more protection from the elements. I used a spray primer by BIN, which is my preferred brand.

We then attached it to the table base, mostly because Mr. Much More Patient was leaving for a couple weeks and I wanted him to do it before he left. It could have been done at any time in the process after the bottom was primed.

With it attached to the table base I no longer had to rely on the crappy plastic sawbucks, which as you can see in the picture below, fell over with the top on them (the good sawbucks are in continued use with the front screen door, which, if you can believe, I painted backwards about two months ago and is still sitting in the basement waiting to be finished).

Honestly, this is the first part in the process that it occurred to me that I should take some pictures, and I did it mostly to send to my husband to prove that the sawbucks were garbage.

I did about four or five coats of white spray paint on the entire top. I really wanted to coat it well given that the table top could use all the protection it could get. Then I taped off some stripes quickly (and if you look closely you can see they weren't exactly straight, but the priority here was getting a functioning table back) and gave it a full can's worth of spraying with Rustoleum's Stone Gray.

I waited the required 48 hours (that's the thing with spray paint ... you either have to recoat it within an hour or so or wait until it's completely dry in about two days) and then covered in a clear protective spray. Again, my intention is to protect it from the elements as best I could.

When that dried it was a little rough, so I did a very fine wet sanding (where you literally get the sandpaper good and wet) with 1500-grit sandpaper (which I assume we have around for various boat-related projects) just to get it nice and smooth without taking off much of the clear lacquer.

I actually like the new look of the table much more than the old look. I know it won't last very long and I have to wipe it off a lot because the white shows every speck of dirt, but it serves it's purpose beautifully. All told we probably spent about $40 on this (if you divide the cost of the plywood since we still have half a sheet for another project), which is much less than a new table would have cost. I'm not sure if we'll get more than this summer out of it, but we'll certainly enjoy it plenty this year.

Decking the outside

I had so much fun decorating the outside this year, partly because it's fun to deck out the "new house" and partly because it's been downright nice (for December) to be outside this year. If it weren't for not wanting to totally break the bank, I would have just kept on decorating. It's no secret that I love Deborah Silver's container designs, but I draw so much inspiration from her amazing holiday creations.

One of the things I did that's new this year, is mix in obviously faux materials with natural materials. I had seen Deborah do it and it intrigued me, so I added the sparkly balls to the  window box. Another little tip I learned from reading Deborah's blog is to wire the dogwood twigs together before putting them in the pot to keep them in nicer bundles. I also added faux eucalyptus to the containers  as it was easier to find (and less expensive than the real stuff). The greens and the dogwood were all gathered from our property or my parents' property (OK, maybe the field across the road from my parents, but close).

 

I always fill the big container by the front door, too and that got a similar greens/dogwood/eucalyptus treatment.

 

I put in some C9 LEDs as well so it glows at night.

 

For the first time, I also filled the container I leave in the garden as well. It's not lit but I love looking out the kitchen window at it.

But I had the most fun decorating the pergola. As I've mentioned before, given the orientation of the deck, the pergola doesn't really do much in the way of shading. It's purely aesthetic and I'd be lying if I didn't say that that decorating it for Christmas was on my mind when we (and by we I mean me since Mr. Much More Patient still doesn't understand what the purpose of the pergola is) decided to have it built as part of the deck project.

I had intended to pull the fake fruit off these Costco wreaths and put on ornaments instead, but I kind of liked the natural look more. I hung a wreath on two sides of the pergola and stuck some nice, big red bows on them. The garland is also lit and I just love how it all looks at night. I always cut my garland and rewire it so that it's facing the right direction. I can't stand garland running against the grain on the vertical.

 

I'm thrilled with how it turned out. If we were having a big party I might have swagged garland all along the deck railing and added small wreaths at the bottom of the stairs. Lately I'm finding it much more fun to decorate outside than inside. Not sure why, but I'm sure the nice weather has something to do with it.

Construction update No. 12: Pergola sitting pretty

I bet Mr. Much More Patient had never heard the word pergola until about a year ago when I said, "Ooh, we should have a pergola!"

His response was, "What is a pergola for?"

Now that we actually HAVE a pergola, I thought it would all be clear to him. So when it was assembled on the deck last week he called me at work to let me know it was going in. The conversation went something like this:

Him: "The pergola is going in."
Me: "Awesome! How does it look?"
Him: "Pretty good I guess. What is this for again?"

Our next door neighbor has been anxiously awaiting the arrival of the pergola because he has pergola envy. A friend we saw at a holiday party lit up when I mentioned it. Her husband said "What do you need a pergola for?"

I guess you either "get" pergolas, or you don't. The answer to the question "What is it for", by the way, is nothing. In this case, it does nothing. We don't really need shade on this east-facing deck. I just like it.

I also think it serves the purpose of breaking up a rather large expanse of house that rises much higher than two stories normally do because our foundation is raised out of the ground quite a bit.

So here's what it looks like (at 4 p.m. on Sunday when I got around to getting outside to take some pictures):

It's smaller than I think it was supposed to be, but it's OK and I'm to the point where I'm not sweating the small stuff. Yes, I would have liked it better had it been another foot or 18 inches bigger, but it's OK the way it is too.

It's not very impressive when you look at it from that angle, but here's how it looks from the yard.

As an aside, do you know how excited I am to start planning the landscaping around it? I can't wait!

To get a better feeling for how it helps this side of the house, here's what it looks like without the deck or pergola.

And if you really want to have your minds blown, here's what the house looked like before we started all this.

I really can't get over how different it is.

By the way, did you notice the railings on the deck?

These fall under the "major score" category. We really wanted a railing that was sort of reminiscent of a ship railing. Since we'll be putting in cable railings (which look just like lifelines on sailboats because they ARE lifelines from sailboats) come spring, we thought a ship-type railing would look nice. As it turns out, hardwood railings are pricey items, and when you get to the end of an over-budget renovation it's hard to justify an expensive railing. So we had sort of given up hope, when our contractor called us and said he had found several lengths of Brazilian redwood (I'm sure that's a generic name for it) in the remnant bin at the lumber yard. It was all left over from a big deck job and there was enough for our relatively small deck. I think the cost was somewhere around $3.50 a foot, compared to the more than $10 a foot for Ipe.  Not bad huh?

I love the look. We almost put the kabosh on the deck when it was obvious we were going to go over budget but I'm so happy we didn't.  I think it's going to really expand the living space of the house and I can envision a lot of great parties on that deck when the weather warms up.

If you're interested in what else has been going on with this renovation, check out this post.