It has been a few weeks since my last update, but I’m so excited to share all of the amazing progress that is happening at our house. Last week, a crew FINALLY started working at our house. This has been over a year in the making, and I feel a sense of excitement and relief that we are moving in the right direction. I’ll be giving a full update on what the crew has been up to soon, but for now, I want to focus on the DIY projects that my husband and I have been working on…
Over the past year, the interior of our house has been in a constant state of demolition, so we haven’t had the opportunity to enjoy our home. Now that the weather has been nicer, we have decided to start putting more effort into improving our outdoor space. This is a part of our home we can still enjoy, even while the interior continues to be under construction. In one of my previous posts, I mentioned we refurbished an old wrought iron table and chair set. Check that out here. Since then, we have continued to expand our livable outdoor space with a picnic table and fire pit!
Similar to the wrought iron table and chairs, we inherited the picnic table with the house. It was also well overdue for an update. We started by power washing the table to remove and loose paint and dirt. We then needed to sand down the table as much as possible to ensure that the new painted surface would be smooth. To make quicker work of this, we decided to purchase a power sander from Lowe’s. We got this Dewalt Corded Sander at a very affordable price and it ended up being perfect for what we needed. I couldn’t imagine trying to sand the entire table and benches by hand. It would have taken forever without the power sander.
With everything sanded and cleaned, it was now time for the best part, paint! I chose Benjamin Moore Kendall Charcoal as the color and used the Ben Exterior paint in Lowe Lustre. Kendall Charcoal is going to be a reoccurring color in my basement and outdoor spaces. The paint went on very smooth and covered the table well. I did end up doing three coats on all the high touch surfaces, just to make sure that everything was as smooth and even as possible. Check out the before and after! I can’t wait to pull everything together with outdoor decor to really make this space an extension of our home.
In addition to the picnic table, my husband and I also built a fire-pit in our back yard. It doesn’t get much better than sitting around a fire pit roasting marshmallows with your friends and family. I’m so excited that we can do this now! We ordered all the supplies for building the fire-pit from Lowe’s and had it delivered to our house. We used this Fire Pit Ring and 36 Flagstone Blocks in the color Allegheny. We dug up the sod, tamped down the dirt, and filled the area with sand before arranging the blocks in a circle. This is an easy afternoon project that anyone can do! We’ve already spent a few evenings at the fire-pit and I can’t wait until we live at our house so that we can do it all the time! Long term, we plan to create a complete patio around the fire-pit, but for now, I’ll enjoy the fire-pit all the same.