home tour tuesday: the back deck

I haven’t done a Home Tour Tuesday in sometime, but if I can get my act together, I might just deliver three in a row.

Our house already had an awesome screened-in back porch area, the screened-in porch opens to a larger deck that overlooks our back yard. From the time we moved in, I started talking about turning the area into an outdoor living space. It never really moved up the list of priorities because we always had some other project happening.

I envisioned reading books and sipping my coffee out there in the mornings. Truly, it’s hard to get a man on board with a leisurely area such as this. Let him build a fire pit in the backyard? He’ll stay up until midnight getting it done. Of course! So, then it hit me. Last summer, I changed the verbiage a bit, and started talking about how nice it would be to have an area where we could watch football games in the fall.

And would you believe by the first football game we were all set up and ready to go?

Hook, line, and sinker, friends.

Here’s what we started with. Well, almost what we started with. The screens are out at this point, they had seen their better days, so Allen took them out and replaced them. Also, the wood along the bottom section had already been changed a bit, too. Those boards ran vertical across each section. Some of the boards were warped (not terribly, but enough that I noticed and it bothered me), but I hated the idea of replacing them all,  it seemed like a big waste just to quiet my Type-A mind. Instead, Allen configured them a little differently and we re-used all of the same wood. We also cleaned and re-stained the wood in a darker color.

Let’s talk about patio furniture. Honestly, I found this process to be such a huge pain. We originally looked at a few local places to purchase the furniture and we faced a little sticker shock at the price of some of the sectionals we found. Like, double the cost of all of Judson’s nursery furniture combined (and we bought it from Pottery Barn, for crying out loud). Seriously, I took one look at the price tag and said to Allen, There is no way, this is going to be outside. Bugs will crawl on it! Nope. Not happening. 

So we looked to the trusty internet and had plenty of people point me in the direction of Lex Mod. We measured and taped out the area and settled on the Corona 7 Piece Set in Mocha.

In all fairness, the pieces that we were looking at were exceptional quality, super heavy, and in some cases, hand woven. The LexMod furniture is light-weight, but it certainly serves its purpose well. In hindsight, I would still go with this sectional over and over again.

Curtains were my other major request. I went straight to Ikea for these. They’re Merete panels come in the exact length we needed, 2 panels to a set for around $35. We sprayed the grommets at the top with Rustoleom and the actual panels with Scotch Guard (along with the cushions on the sectional). I’ve washed them once and they clean up perfectly.

As far as the curtain rods go, Allen made those (y’all, he’s super awesome). He used conduit  from the hardware store and it really looks fantastic, and it’s super inexpensive.

I decorated the area with bright colors. Rug from Target and pillows from Tuesday morning. I snagged that piece of drift wood from my father-in-law after Judson’s birthday party.

Overall, it was such a fun project and we both agree, we should have done this a long time ago. We put a patio heater out here for chilly days. It’s also the perfect date night at home escape, there’s always time for a movie and popcorn after the little ones are sleeping.