Weekend project!

Back in the winter, we made a list of things we wanted to get done around the house this spring and summer.  Repainting the picnic table and benches was one of them.  We did that yesterday and Larry even replaced the whole top of the table that had a couple of rotten spots so now we'll have it for years and years to come.

Being the counterculture folks that we are, we wanted something different from just a brown table and benches.  Larry had the idea of doing every piece a different color and I picked the colors.  I was going for beachy colors.  If you've ever been to our house, you know our "style" is eclectic.  We like vintage, we like the beach and we like stuff that reflects our hippie hearts.  My friend, Lisa, even told me Thursday that our house looked like it belonged at the beach!  

So for the picnic table and benches, I picked stone gray, seafoam green, cool blue, latte and cream.  I painted the benches and Larry painted the table.  And it's a good thing we painted the picnic table and benches before we painted the deck (that's another one on our list!).  I'm just sayin'.  :)

I think they turned out beautiful!!

I didn't plan for them to match our patio set but when I was painting the blue bench after the green one, it hit me.

Yay for three-day weekends and home projects!

Weekend projects!

We had lots of stuff to do around the house this weekend.  Larry built me an outside shower that I am soooooo excited about!  I spend a lot of time outside, in the garden, at the clothesline, battling squash bugs and it gets hot out there.  He wanted me to have a place to cool off (until we put that pool in!) and he even enjoyed it himself today after cutting the grass.  I'm surprised y'all didn't hear his Jerry Clower-like holler when that cold water hit his hot head this afternoon.  :)
  
Here he is testing the water pressure and how cool is that rainbow??  God's promise!
 

And here I am testing the water.  It was fabulous!!!

Last weekend when we went to the beach, we picked up this solid wood table for A DOLLAR at an estate sale.  Larry found it stuck out in a barn, covered in spider webs and dirt.  I didn't know exactly what I wanted to do with it, I just knew I loved it and I wanted it so we got it!

 

Today I painted it!  I wanted turquoise so we got a quart of paint yesterday.  I picked Valspar's Seafarer and I absolutely LOVE it!  

I put it out by the shower to hold our towels and wash cloths and soap.  I think it looks great there!  And has a new life and a new purpose.  :)
 

My pink dahlia bowl

I found a vintage 1946 Multi Products faux wooden bowl at Goodwill a couple of weeks ago for $2 and even though it was speckled with paint, I got it, thinking I could get the paint off of it and fix it.  Well, that proved to be harder than I thought and it ended up worse off than it was when I bought it.  :(

So I decided I would paint it and give it a new life.  I've never been crafty in my entire life.  Ami got all that talent in our family.  But since I painted the tiny picnic table we have and most recently, the birdbath, I built up some confidence to try to paint this bowl, too.

I wish I'd taken a before picture but since I didn't, I found this one on Etsy instead.  This is what the bowl looked like before somebody speckled it with red, green and yellow paint and dropped it off at the Goodwill on 96.  It really was a beautiful bowl!  And for the Multi Products company to produce a faux wooden (plastic) bowl in 1946 is just amazing to me.  They had no idea the evil that plastic would become and I didn't even realize that plastic was being used back then.

During my research, I found out that the flower in the middle is a dahlia and I chose to paint it pink, since that's my favorite color.  I painted the bowl white to start with and let it dry several days and this morning, I filled in the rest.  I think it turned out really pretty!

Painted birdbath

We picked up a concrete birdbath last summer at an estate sale and I have been constantly trying to keep it clean.  It developed some kind of rust on the bottom and I have scrubbed with baking soda and every kind of natural cleaner I had, avoiding bleach because (1) I hate bleach and try not to use it and (2) I didn't want to hurt the birds who bathe in there.  Larry had this great idea to paint it!  With concrete paint!  So I did today!

I started with painting the bowl a real pretty blue.  You can see how ugly that rust was in this picture.  Yuck.  I wouldn't want to take a bath in that.

Then I painted a yellow center and accent marks on the petals.  We're making a flower!

Yay!!  A clean and pretty birdbath!

Our Memorial Day

While Larry grilled our burgers and hot dogs, I painted this child-size picnic table that came with our house.  It's really too small for Elizabeth and Emma but Charlotte will be here soon and she can sit at it when she comes to visit!

Banjo and Tabbie Hoffman hung around for a while but when Tabbie got bored and Banjo figured out I didn't have any food for him, they both left me.

 

 

Larry brought me a glass of tea but I didn't get to drink it for very long.

 

My very own grill master.  :)

He did a great job, too!!

Back to work!

And here it is, all freshly painted and ready for a little girl and her sippy cup.

I hope you all had a wonderful Memorial Day weekend and I hope you stopped a minute and thought about how we came to have this holiday --- to remember with a grateful heart the many men and women who gave their lives in combat.  

We honor their sacrifice and will never forget them.