Wine and Book Ready

Every year for the past 4 we have spent 10 days in Europe in the Spring.  I always waited until after that trip, usually mid-April to early May, to set up the outdoor living room.  This is one of the reasons we want to stay in the house.  It is directly off our dining area and is lovely to look out at.  We both spend a lot of hours out here each year.

Real life, beer can on coffee table and all lol (missed that when I was taking the picture yesterday)

Originally we were going to set this up fast to show it to prospective buyers but since changing our mind about selling we decided we were still going to set it up early this year.  We have been blessed with beautiful sunny days all week and 12-15 degrees Celcius beautiful weather so now was the time.  I even sprung for some early annuals in a few pots.  I won't put in our front flowerbed for several weeks yet but this gives us a nice pop of colour and I spent a total of  $20.57 on flowers and I had to replace one of the$4  yellow dollar store pots as hubby accidently killed it when it was stored in the garage.  These are primulas and cyclamen, both hardy plants for cool non-frost mornings.  By June it will get too hot for these flowers so I will switch them to something else.  If there appears any chance of frost in the forecast I can bring the pots inside for the night.

We bought 3 of the outdoor mats when on sale for $40 each a couple of years ago. Still in great shape but the edging as faded.  I've ordered some fabric paint and I will attempt to paint the edging black to clean them up.

3 colours of clyclamen

I bought the hen and chicks last weekend at a flea market for $1

unusual type of primula in pots we brought back from Spain 3 years ago

We bought the patio set when we moved here almost 7 years ago.  The cushions are a bit faded but odd size so can't be replaced.  I was going to try and make some replacement cushions but we realized the frame is rusting out due to our weather (cushions come in in winter but the frames stay out) so we will just try and squeeze a bit more time out of the set as it is.  Two of the seams on the cushions dry rotted so I hand sewed it back together and it is still holding, that was 2 years ago.  It still looks good and we've looked but so far nothing comes close to the quality and price of this set.  Unfortunately they no longer make these or we likely would buy the same set again.

I also planted a seed packet of cilantro, one of spinach (I can't stand it cooked but love it raw in salads) and planted a bunch of English cucumber seeds which will hopefully grow into good starts by May which is when I will move them to containers outside.  If not I will buy some.  Cilantro seems to grow better here in the Spring versus summer.

We need to relax a little bit today as the last 3 whole days have spent working on the outside.  The "Lifetime" horizontal shed we bought in the last post has been put together.  For something that was made in America the instructions were so terrible that it took us two days, a total of 8 hours to put it together.  We had work appointments on Thursday that were cancelled so we took the opportunity to do work on it.  We often work weekends for the business so it evens out in the end.  Hubby looked at online reviews.  Obviously some of them are fake as there was one that said he put it together by himself in 2 hours.  Seriously, there were about 60 pages of instructions with terrible diagrams and things weren't properly labeled so we had to guess a lot.  In a few cases we put things on wrong and had to fix them.  There is zero chance anyone put that shed together by themselves.  We intend to add a strongly worded cautionary review of it.  Anyway, the shed is in one piece and will now work perfectly for what we need in terms of outdoor storage.  We need to have our irrigation guy cap off one sprinkler head before we can move it to the correct spot then hubby needs to build a small wooden platform to put it on and paint it so that he can run the weed wacker around it without damaging the outside of the shed.  

Keter Deck Box

We also ended up buying the deck box at Costco for $150 - it took a mere 45 minutes to put together, and is perfect.  This box is huge, and will be great for me to store all my ceramic pots in and hand tools for gardening.  No more accidental pot breakage from storing them in the garage.  Now we should have zero storage issues in the garage and outside.  That checks a huge box for staying in this house.  We just need to work on inside storage.  To date everything we have done has been paid for in full with our current paychecks.  I still have about $1500 in the home fund to access (that is used for repair, maintenance and things bought for the home) before we have to get into savings.  We will use savings for our carpet replacement.  Hopefully we can try and scope out carpet for the bedrooms in the next week or two so it can be scheduled.  

Today is a day of rest, we kind of overdid it this week and our bodies are paying for it.   We also have a heavier work week ahead so need to be ready for that.  Definitely wine and book patio time is in the cards this afternoon.