Patio Upcycle/Recycle

Well, its Sunday evening. Which means I have had time to do some work around the house. Given that Mr. Husband and I had downtime after the wedding and decided what our priority was with wedding gift money, we spent this weekend on it - OUR PATIO.

Mr. Husband and I love being outside in the summer time. I plan on spending a lot of time outside reading for my summer course and planning out the coming school year. Our patio this last summer and fall only had the following items on it:

A plastic patio table that was passed on from my parents. We love the table but it was a little blah. Being practical and knowing my craftiness, Mr. Husband suggested that instead of replacing it that I upcycle it. How you ask? The cheap and easy way - spray paint.

I went back to our local big box hardware store and found a paint/primer in one spray can that is approved and recommended for plastic pieces. The hard part was going to be choosing a color. Knowing my tendencies, Mr. Husband suggested I wait until we had chosen new patio chairs.

Let me tell you, we sat in a TON of patio chairs since the wedding trying to pick the best one. We had a great deal of discussion on style, material and storage for the winter. After finding a really good deal at our Fred Meyer (we are in the PNW after all), and several coupons, AND finding out my parents were looking at buying two of the same chairs, we settled on buying a set of six. My parents took two, we took four and everyone was happy.

So back to the big box store I went and purchased some "hammered" style spray paint to match the new chairs.

 When spray painting on a large scale, I highly recommend doing it outside, on top of cheap garbage bags or a cheap shower curtain. I ended up putting out globe centerpieces from the wedding down as weights because the bag kept blowing up as the paint dried.

So, here is a before and after shot:

Now seeing that the patio table was sprayed, it was time to assemble our new chairs.

 Of our set of chairs, three out of four were very easy to assemble. The fourth chair, the last to be assembled, of course did not want to cooperate. We will be calling the manufacturer on Monday or Tuesday to talk about how to fix it.

There were a few other projects for us this last Saturday to put our patio together (liquid propane grill, fire pit, rubber mats to kill weeds underneath). At this point, I would say it is about 90% complete. There are a few aesthetic things of course I want to fix but you can see we did okay for one day's work. But at this point, we are stopped for a good long while.

Coming up this week: plans to upcycle and recycle some items around the house for my new classroom!