A few weeks ago, my mom and I were out shopping and hitting up our favorite stores looking for some chairs to go with my new dining table (more on that later). We had zero luck on finding the right dining chairs, but while we were at Garden Ridge we moseyed on over to the patio cushions and spotted some that looked like they might actually fit our old patio furniture. A miracle!
I say a miracle because I've been hunting for the right sized cushions for years! We bought a set at an end-of-season JC Penny sale years ago and I've never really liked the striped fabric that was on the cushions that came with the set, but they worked fine for a while. Then they set out in the elements and started to get a little worn looking so I started trying to replace them. Every cushion I found, though, was sized to fit wicker or really small furniture.
Furniture out on the patio of our old house.
Obviously this furniture traveled with us to our new/current house and we plopped it down on our back patio. We have big plans for this space...it has a great herringbone patterned brick floor and you can access it from three different rooms in the house. The eventual plan will be to screen it in and then lay another brick patio out past it to extend it some. We've already met with a contractor about it so now we're saving our pennies!
The nice thing about this patio is that it's already covered so the furniture doesn't get rained on like it did at our other house. Too bad the damage was already done!
Can you say gross? I mean, really, who wants to sit on that? The view from the backyard really wasn't anything to write home about.
So when we were at Garden Ridge and spotted the cushions that would actually fit this furniture, I forgot all about my dining room and started picking out a pattern. I chose a khaki colored trellis-ish pattern that I thought would be safe a neutral. I decided I could paint the wood part of the furniture any color I wanted and it would pop with the khaki.
Boy was I wrong. Matt's parents were visiting us when I came home with the new cushions. We all decided a light blue would look good and luckily, I already had a gallon of it leftover from another project. The next afternoon I got to work.
Y'all, I think I chose the most humid day of the century to paint those dang pieces. "Dripping with sweat" doesn't even accurately describe what I looked like. More like, "jumped into a pool of smelly sweat." It was miserable!! Not only was it ridiculously hot outside, but the wood was soooo dry that it drank all of my paint right up! I used almost a whole gallon on the four pieces (one loveseat, two chairs, one table) and it took for-ev-er.
The worst part? When I was done with the first coat of paint, I could immediately tell that I hated it.
The light blue paint didn't pop at all and it made my neutral khaki colored cushions look yellow. But still, I decided to sleep on it and see how it looked out on the patio the next day.
The pale blue alone wasn't too bad on the patio.
Then I added the cushions and blah! The clashing colors! The competing patterns! I was back to hating it.
I had no idea what to do. Pick a different color of paint or find different cushions that would work with the blue? I knew a second coat of paint was going to be necessary from the get-go, so all was not a total waste. If I went with a different color this light blue would just be like my primer. No biggie. And thankfully, I had not ripped the tags off the cushions and I still had the receipt (this is rare for me!) so I could return the cushions.
In the end, I did both. I went back to garden ridge and got different cushions and this time, found some paint that I knew would match them. And since I was buying new paint, I went with exterior paint in a satin finish (the light blue was interior eggshell).
Please tell me you love this new look as much as I do!
The teal pops way more than the light blue, right?? And the cushions are really growing on me. They weren't necessarily my favorites at the store, but I'm really starting to like how they look with the teal. I also picked up some green throw pillows and a big green pouf that can serve as an ottoman or extra seating if we had a crowd.
The view above on the right is what I see when I walk in from our garage door. Sometimes I have to just stop and stare for a minute. What a difference some paint and cushions can make! The furniture looks brand new again.
Since I was sprucing up the patio, I also bought this cool mason jar that I found at Home Depot. I couldn't resist! It looks like a mercury glass jar during the day and then at night, thanks to it's solar-powered lid, it lights up like a little lantern! LOOOOOOVE it! I wish I could buy 28 more of them and string 'em up around our backyard. Makes me wanna host an evening party. :)
Now that it looks so much better out on the patio, I really want to spend all my time out there. But unfortunately we've recently learned that our little Katie bug is a magnet for mosquitoes so we haven't been able to spend as much time out there as I'd like. It's got me itching to get the area screened-in as soon as possible. If only I could figure out how to make those pennies we're saving magically multiply...