Antique Furniture Tea-Time Succulent Garden

Earlier this year, we finally had a bit of rain in Southern California. Sadly, that rain weighed down the giant bougainvillea plant that lived here since we moved in, and the plant collapsed from its own weight. After trying everything to save it, including chopping off all the branches and forcing it upright, we removed the bougainvillea. Unfortunately, this left us with a bland view of a white stucco wall through our new/old glass back door!

Though we are planning a custom mural with a friend’s non-profit, Off the Wall Graffiti, the process will likely be somewhat lengthy, so I wanted to quickly elevate the view. Inspired by a friend’s garden, I began searching for some antique furniture to set up some plants on. Luckily, within days I came across some discarded ladderback chairs on the street! These beauties are of solid construction. The faux leather seats are cracked and broken- likely the reason for the discard. On the next block, I encountered a discarded solid wood bookshelf. Walking the dogs was particularly beneficial on this day!

I put some nice planters on the chairs to cover the damaged seats. In each planter I placed some bromeliads, fan plant things (not sure what they’re really called and haven’t been able to identify them online yet), and a couple annuals. A garage sale afforded me some great antique vessels, into which I planted succulents. Great plants for southern California!

This view out the back door is much more pleasant now. I plan to shellac or polyurethane the chairs to help preserve them while they’re outside (although it looks like they’ve possibly been outside for quite some time already), but the view is already much improved! Super easy project took only a matter of hours and changed the yard significantly. Hooray! I probably wouldn’t recommend outdoor wood furniture for rainier climates without some additional layers of protection from the elements.

Since, again, the mural looks like it may take a while, I think I might do some moss graffiti in the meantime.

Found: Beautiful Quilt, Silk Roman Shades!

Now that we’re doing Air BnB, we need the guest room to look its best all the time. In order to do that, it was time to revamp the bedding situation. Some of the queen-sized sheets had been taken camping with us (read: had some dirt stains), and I noticed a small hole in the other set. Furthermore, the bedspread had once been put in a too-hot dryer, which caused a burn hole right in the middle. It was time.

I wanted a quilt, preferably one with diamonds on it to match the diamond muntins on the windows. After poking around Etsy and even Amazon for quilts that weren’t too gaudy or too old, I found a great steal on Ebay. The quilt was hugely discounted because it had a slight tear in it, likely due to a box cutter upon opening originally, according to the seller. When the quilt arrived, I easily fixed the tear (which was hardly noticeable) with some fabric glue. I got this queen-sized Woolrich quilt for $62 including shipping. It didn’t come with any shams or anything, but the quilt is big enough to put over the pillows, which I think would  be the appropriate arrangement.

After I added the linen-like curtains in the guest room (all from Ross, along with the curtain rod, for a total purchase of about $70), I realized the small window over the bed also   looked slightly naked. I was planning to take a full-length curtain and just shorten it to the height of the window, and bought several curtain designs to try. None matched, and it seemed Ross was fresh out of faux linen, though I did purchase another matching curtain rod and install it in anticipation of the new curtains.

And then Craigslist’s free section delivered. I found these amazing SILK Roman shades for free! One happened to match the window’s width exactly, and the set came with two other, more narrow shades. While the smaller ones don’t really belong anywhere, I stripped the fabric off one and used it to create accent pillow covers! I simply re-covered the accent pillows from the green bedding set, rather than buying new ones. Each pillow took only 3 easy seams to make! Leaving the shade halfway open creates some beautiful light effects.

The last piece of the puzzle was this adorable burlap-looking pillow from Ross. The visible side is actually supposed to be the back (the front has a screen-printed design with a bird on a branch or something), but I liked the button side much better.

I still have about one and a quarter of the skinny shades’ fabric left. What else should I make?

 

 

Garden Planters

Stay tuned for a post about painting a cinderblock wall…

I love to grow our fruits and vegetables as often as possible. The mature avocado tree in the back yard produces fruit for nearly half the year, and in the last six months I have also grown squash, strawberries, peppers, onions, carrots, and radishes. Unfortunately, however, these gardens are easily overrun by the traveling Bermuda grass we’ve attempted to grow in the partially shaded backyard.

One of Melanie’s very useful suggestions in our landscape design included some large raised garden planters. We’d downloaded some plans for planters, but when I came across already-built wooden planters that included clumping bamboo (one of our planned plants for a privacy screen) for only $200, I jumped quickly. We rented a Home Depot truck, drove to Santa Monica, and picked up the planters with the bamboo.

After installation but before painting

These 8-ft planters aren’t perfect, but they are already built and are a great size for the growing I plan on doing. We lifted them to the backyard with only small difficulty, then slightly dug out their foundations to ensure the planters would be level with the lines of the cinderblock wall they adjoin.

I found it quite difficult to choose colors for the planters, but eventually settled on matching them to the house itself: pinkish overall, with white wood details. I will also be stenciling on a Craftsman-style design I’ll be utilizing in multiple places inside the home.

In order to avoid purchasing a cost-prohibitive amount of gardening soil (not to mention transporting that soil up the stairs to the yard), we filled the bottom ¾ of the planters with old wood from the large woodpile we inherited. Many of these pieces are too large to burn without quite a bit of chopping, so using them for the planters completed two tasks in one!

We have yet to plant this year’s crops, but installing these good-looking planters is a huge upgrade and a firm step in the right direction.

Much better!