Wow, it's already the second week of September! August just flew by. It's been a busy time with much celebration in our neck of the woods. Anniversaries, birthdays, along with a wedding and guests kept things moving along at a happy pace. In fact it's pretty dull now that life is back to normal. That will all be changing soon as I return to the never ending saga of begging someone to work on our house.
A home improvement salesperson recently informed me that the concrete slab with a roof and screens attached to the back of our house is not a patio but a lanai. Ok, fair enough. In a couple of months I will certainly be mulling that word over when I pester Nick to shovel the snow off the "lanai". He usually calls it the back porch. It's not like we have a front porch, that's more of a stoop (and I'm fairly confident about that terminology). Whatever it's called, it needs a new roof and screens.
Unfortunately there's not one single repair person who is willing to tackle all the various problems. Looking back, it might not have been such a bad idea to hire a contractor to oversee a project of a 150 square feet even if it didn't involve plumbing or electricity. So we blundered forward and did get the holes fixed that the squirrel made last spring and the rain gutters replaced. Then it was party time.
Having no time or person to make the needed repairs, I decided our only hope was some sort of redecorating. This happily coincided with a half-price sale on already half-priced material at the fabric store. Having never sewn on outdoor material I was pretty intimidated. Combining that with a fifty year old sewing machine and seamstress skills learned in junior high, what could go wrong?
Well, the fabric turned out to be really easy to sew, even after I forgot to change the needle to the one specifically made for use with this material. My main efforts were focused on the sofa and curtains. For the curtains I used this retro-Hawaiian-Tiki-bark cloth. I laughed when I came across it, the colors were perfect and as I already mentioned it was 75% off! There was a very similar patterned fabric in our sunroom when we first moved into this house, it was burgundy and grey, of course. Ha!
Originally my scheme was to go for a boho look, as that usually works when I have lots of things that wouldn't necessarily go together. So basically, the plan was to get fabric in a color and pattern I didn't mind too much. I'll probably redo the sofa cushions next year as I didn't make piping for the edges due to being pressed for time and worried my old sewing machine wouldn't be able to sew through four layers of fabric. Anything is better than the horrid greige tweed it is underneath, yuck!
This is the embarrassing before photo.
This is around the time of Nick's birthday, and it ended up not looking too bad. I've decided ferns are to disguising household flaws as whipped cream is to covering up birthday cake disasters. We didn't have enough time or dry weather to stain the concrete floor and there's still one whole side of screens that need to be replaced and then it all needs to be painted. It just goes on and on. Maybe next year?
I still can't decide on what color to paint my funky vintage chairs. Right now they're the faded yellow-greeninsh tan they were when I bought them. Currently I'm leaning towards off white to go with the table but I can see them in the bronze/brown color of the sofa frame, too. Any thoughts?
I'll end (as did the month of August) with the birthday boy.
Quite a blaze, good thing we didn't burn down the lanai.
Hope everyone had a great Labor Day weekend.
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