One Room Challenge Fall 2018: Week Six

Reveal day is here! Yay!

Buuuuuut I don’t have a reveal for you. Boo!

Saturday I raked the area next to the walkway a bit more and started spreading gravel around the finished pavers, Kyle got the last two concrete forms set, and he leveled the two sides of the arbor to each other. OG was sick again over the weekend and then Sunday (aka the day we were going to pour the last two pavers and finish building the arbor) I woke up sick and Kyle hurt his back. I was able to spread a little more gravel but other than that Sunday was 100% unproductive.

Then of course this week we’ve been recovering and working at our actual jobs and it’s too dark after work to get anything done outside plus the weather has been uncooperative. I’m bummed we weren’t able to finish our space but it should just take us one more good weekend of work and then hopefully we’ll still have time to enjoy it before it gets too cold!

While I don’t have a full on reveal, I do have some before and “in progress” photos that show how far both spaces have come.

Let’s start with the walkway. Here’s what it looked like before:

And here’s what it looks like now!

We cleared all the junk, tackled some DIY 4×4 concrete pavers (first time ever working with concrete), and started filling in around the pavers with gravel. We are still planning on doing some planters along the walkway and hanging cafe lights but we need to do a bunch of leveling work to the right of the pavers first and we’ll likely also build a small retaining wall. We should be able to completely finish off the pavers on Saturday and then after they cure a couple of days we can pop the forms off and finish spreading the gravel.

We also decided that instead of figuring out how to route the downspout away from the house, we’re going to get a rain barrel instead. We’ve talked about getting one for a while and now is a good time for us to do it instead of routing and burying a drain around the pavers. Originally we were going to keep our big green trash and yard bins here and build a privacy screen but I’m glad we decided to move those inside the garage instead.

Our pavers definitely aren’t perfect but I think they turned out pretty good considering it was our first time working with concrete. They still need a good cleaning but I’m really happy with how they turned out!

Of course now that we have this area starting to come together all we can think about is how great it would look next to white brick instead of our orange brick.

Now let’s take a look back at the patio. Before it was just dirt, weeds, junk, and dog poop.

We cleared all the crap (literally), spread a bunch of gravel, and built (part of) an arbor. Here’s what it looks like now-ish:

We can actually use it! Just imagine it with a finished arbor, cushions on the furniture, cafe lights, and no baby jail or stray adirondack chair, We’ve already sat out here once and it’ll be a great area to host people once it’s finished. Once I get the planters on the arbor trimmed out, I plan on grabbing some end of season mums to fill them in.

We just got Odessa’s baby swing yesterday which we’ll hang from the center supports of the arbor when it’s finished. Once the pressure treated lumber dries out we’ll be staining the arbor the same color as our fence.

We still need to hang our string lights and I want to build a table to go along the brick wall that we can use for drinks and s’mores for fire pit nights.

I wish I could have had a better post for you guys today but things happen! I’m still happy with the progress we made over the last 6 weeks and I’m excited to get everything finished.

Make sure you go check out all of the other (finished) spaces right here! And if you want to see our spaces actually finished be sure to check back in soon.