Sunday, May 27, 2012

Saturday, May 26, 2012

Reclamation and refurbishment 5 - finally!

Well, we finished the garden rennovations ages ago. Unfortunately, we have had the coldest May in years since then. It has also rained. Lots! I think it was the drought warnings and hosepipe bans that did it.

The deck is nice seating area again, now:



We did manage to use it in the cooler weather, too:


But it is much better now.

We finally had an excuse to get the parasol up, too:



We're very pleased with this new seating area. It extends the time we can spend outside, considerably.

Friday, May 18, 2012

Reclamation and refurbishment 4

A little while ago we bought some garden furniture from a local seller on eBay. It was by Firmans and made of teak, but had seen better days, but it was very cheap, so we thought it might be worth a bid.



We stored it on our new patio/sitting area and decided we liked it so much we would put some effort into restoring it. J stripped off the layer of treacly brown stain that the previous owners had splashed on in places, cleaned it down with wire wool and gave it a couple of coats of teak oil. Looks like a completely different set of furniture now. Even nicer than we could have hoped for.



Finding shower-proof seat cushions for the chairs was trickier than I imagined. I expected that every UK garden centre would be full of the things, given the kind of summer weather we usually get, but no. I contemplated making some out of oilcloth, but I'm not sure that the combination of heat, bottoms and plastic is what I'm really going for here. So, eventually found some in Next. Didn't get the matching parasol as I wanted something a bit bigger.