One Room Challenge Fall 2018: Week Five

Holy smokes week five already?! And November at that. Remember a couple of weeks ago when I felt so confident about finishing on time and then last week when I was a little less sure? Well, I’m even less sure this week. Uh oh.

Even with my uncertainty about meeting the deadline, we did make some good progress this week! But we really only have 1 day to work this weekend (maybe 1.5) and we still have a lot to do. Here’s what we got done this week:

Started building the arbor.

Saturday we plopped OG in her baby jail outside and fed her puffs to keep her distracted while we put the planters together and started to build the arbor. It still has a ways to go but we’re planning on finishing it off Saturday morning. We just need to make the cuts for the tops pieces and get them bolted on and I need to trim out the planters and add ya know, plants. I won’t be able to stain it yet (at least the arbor pieces) because we used pressure treated lumber which needs to dry out for several weeks before finishing. Once the arbor is finished we can hang our lights!

Poured more pavers and started cleaning up the area around the walkway.

My mom came over on Sunday to help watch OG so that Kyle and I could both get some work done for a few hours. While Kyle built and leveled forms, I started to rake and pull weeds and monkey grass. The pavers are taking us a long time because we’re only able to mix 1-2 bags of concrete at a time and each paver takes 5+ bags of concrete. We did talk about renting a small concrete mixer but decided it wasn’t worth it. We wised up when we were on our last paver (for that day) and started mixing in an extra baby pool we had laying around which was a little better than our seen-better-days wheelbarrow. We were able to get 3 more pavers done for a total of 4 and we have 2 more to do. My hope is to get the two forms built and leveled Saturday at the very least and either pour and float the pavers that day or Sunday afternoon if we are able to.

I tried to intentionally leave more texture in these pavers but it was surprisingly difficult. I also may have had a duh moment and accidentally gotten some over spray from the hose on a somewhat freshly poured paver. Whoops. I’ll be popping the forms off later this afternoon if the rain holds off. I had planned on taking them off late Tuesday but they didn’t look quite set enough so I left them and then didn’t have time after work on Wednesday before trick or treating started.

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That’s really all we got done over the weekend but those were big items to check off or at least partially check off. The other biggest task is pressure washing but after realizing we were running out of time and with no clue how we’d be able to tackle the upper parts of our house we decided to hire this out. We have a guy coming today to take care of pressure washing and cleaning our gutters which means I’ll be able to mark it off the list. We probably also won’t be cleaning up the foliage around the walkway quite as much as I had wanted but that will be a good task to do later this Fall or early winter when everything has died off.

On another note, I started to play around with furniture placement on the patio and in the end I think the modular sofa we have and the adirondacks are just too much so we’re just going to store the adirondacks in the garage for now and use them somewhere else or just pull them out when we need extra seating. Bonus: this means I don’t have to stain them right now so I can take that off the list, too.

Here’s our updated to do list!

PATIO

Clean out junk
–Clear ground – pull weeds and small trees, move large stones, rake out area
-Dig out next to bricks to allow space for gravel
-Weed current brick walkway 
-Lay extra bricks to complete existing brick walkway
-Order gravel to have delivered
-Lay weed fabric
-Spread gravel
-Pressure wash siding and brick – Hired out and happening any minute now
–Build adirondack kits
-Remove rust from outdoor sectional 
-Build/stain outdoor console table (Planning on scrambling to do this next week before reveal day)
-Hang cafe lights (hopefully this weekend after we finish the arbor)
-Decorate/Style space
-Build arbor/baby swing stand – In Progress

WALKWAY

-Clear junk
-Rake out/remove existing mulch
-Remove weeds
-Remove monkey grass that has regrown – In Progress
-Transplant plum trees (not enough light in current location)
-Clean up/remove surrounding foliage – In Progress
-Pressure wash – Hired out and happening any minute now
-DIY large concrete pavers – In progress (2 left!)
-Hang cafe lights
-Fill in with gravel
-Build planters – In Progress

As always, make sure you check out what everyone else is up to right here.