March 8, 2012

Easy Ways to dress up your Patio

When I bought my first house in 2010 it had a nice little brick patio next to the carport. The house had hadn’t been lived in for over a year and everything was over grown, so we had to do a little digging to find it. After we cleared out all the over grown trees we found the nice brick patio. The previous owner laid it himself and we were told it’s made with historic bricks from the local high school, that he got when they were updating the school.

If you are good at envisioning things, you can see the potential in the picture above. If you’re not it probably just looks like a big mess. Step one was to cut back back all those tress and rip out tons of fern. If you’re thinking of using Fern in your landscape, DON’T!! It’s so invasive and will triple in size in no time, it more of a pain then anything else. We also had to pick up the piles of leaves that had fallen over the last year. We haven’t done much with that flower bed yet, that’s on the “to do” list. We wanted to make it a nice area where we could sit and relax. It was also going to be our grilling area. The weird part about this patio is that it’s on the side of the house and can be seen from the street. It really depends on you if that’s a bad thing. I’d prefer something a little more private, but luckily we don’t live a very high traffic road so It’s not too bad. We did put up one short fence panel to have something to hide the behind so it’s not so visible from the street.

After our wedding we used our Home Depot gift cards, to get out new grill, a friend gifted us a fire pit for Christmas,and my Mom gave us so Adirondack chairs that we painted. She also also gave us her old patio set when they got a new one, we re-painted it and it’s good as new!

We tried to get fancy and added some wood poles at the front and side entrances to the patio. We thought it would be nice to mark the entrances to the patio, we threw some some solar lights on top and hung hanging plants on them. It was a nice little touch.

So far we are really enjoying having this new area to sit and relax. After a few day though we realized how dark it gets out there at night. There’s no lights on that side of the house. Matt had a hard time grilling cause it was so dark, we got a small light that clips to the grill which helped with that. To fix the issue of darkness for the overall patio, we finally put up the lights we got after Christmas. They had been sitting in our storage room for months and I figured it was time to finally put them up. There’s something about adding string lights to a patio that I just love. It instantly dresses up what ever area you add them too. Now that we can see on the patio, we’ve been spending so much time out there. With all the cool weather we’ve been having lately, it’s been the perfect way to relax in the evenings.