It’s a very gloomy day outside today, perfect for staying in and going over the recent photos I’ve taken of Nick, Boycat Eddie and me getting our outside space spruced up for summer living! The past several days have been a combination of work and relaxation, though I have to admit, Nick was doing more of the work and Ed and I were doing the lion’s share of relaxing.
The jobs that he tackled included putting a coat of protectant on our wooden chairs. They needed it after a winter spent outdoors in the rain and snow, as these are too big to come inside for the winter. He also decided to stain our deck. This is something we’ve talked about doing for a while and one day last week, he got busy and got the whole job done! He picked out the colour by himself and I couldn’t be happier with his choice. He selected a semi-transparent stain so the lovely light-blue colour shows up well, but now that it is dry, it is faded and looks like it’s been there for years. I love it.
Now we are pretty well ready to sit back and enjoy. I have to say that it has taken us a long time to get our outside area nice and cozy. Good outdoor furniture is expensive and we had so many other home-related things we needed before we could concentrate on outside. For years we lived with a crappy rusted (but not in a quaint way) table that someone else had trashed, and some impossible-to-clean plastic stacking chairs. It was not inviting and we didn’t spend much time out there.
Last summer was really the first summer we used the deck regularly. That was partially because we could no longer put off having our kitchen gutted and renovated, which took pretty well the whole summer. We had no choice but to stay outside because inside was a disaster! (Worth it though because we so love our new kitchen.) But we got outside also because we had finally bought a wooden outdoor dining table and chairs, plus those lounging chairs I mentioned earlier. I still want to get some cushions to go on the chairs, but that will be just be for extra cushiness and can wait.
Back to the past few days, I bought some chives to add to the herb garden, and also decided to have a go at growing lettuces. Looking forward to (hopefully) having a salad of home-grown greens soon! We also got a few pots of flowers, annuals to decorate this space. Eddie gave the aroma of the fuchsia plant a thumps-up. We enjoyed our first meal outside .. Caesar Salad and pasta. And, yes I am late to the party but I read ‘The Hunger Games’. Fantastic, right?!
On Saturday night we did something we’d never done before … I grabbed a blanket and spread it out on the little patch of grass that’s at the front of our home. We brought out some wine and both laid down on it, with Eddie there too, nabbing a little bit of space on a corner of the blanket. We were only a few meters from the sidewalk and the neighbourhood was buzzing with people out and about on the gorgeous evening. We could hear the music from a live-band playing somewhere and the muted sounds of city life going on all around us. People walked by without noticing we were there, and we chatted and laughed long into the night. The next morning I found our forgotten drinking glasses on the lawn.
Thanks for visiting. I hope things are going well with you.
loulou
