One Room Challenge – Spring 2020

It’s One Room Challenge time again and I am joining with a small outdoor project to refresh what we already have and prepare our vegetable garden.

Everything is different right now but one thing is the same – paint can make a huge difference to change what you already have and also to maintain materials outdoors. A lot of people are also more interested in growing their own seeds (myself included) so I’ll be sharing some of my trials and errors with gardening over the past few years.

One thing I have learned is that kale is so easy and provides green vegetables for months!

Kale from my garden – it’s so easy to grow!

Here’s a quick refresh of my ORC 2017 where I built my own planters and trellis:

How to Build Cedar Planters

 

This time we already have raised beds so I will just be changing the colour. One difference about our new home is that we have deer that come into the backyard and eat the garden so I will be figuring out a way to build a fence around this garden area. This was last summer with my Father in Law just after we moved in, late July.

Last year I naively thought that this little bit of chicken wire would keep out the deer. Two days later they had decimated the vegetables that I had planted.

I moved what was left of the vegetables into one box and made this ugly arrangement that did keep out the deer and did grow a ton of lettuce and kale.

Vegetables thrive here in the Okanagan. This little raised bed produced these large romaine leaves, swiss chard and kale despite being planted at the end of July.

This year I want to maximize what I grow in these three raised beds while making it prettier and more functional.

Right next to the raised beds is a hot tub that is in good condition inside, but the outer wood needs a new stain to protect it. This umbrella got destroyed by an animal last summer too so I am hoping to build a large pergola for shade.

Project Plan:

• New coat of paint on previously painted wood raised beds
• Sand & restain cedar
• Build a fence for the vegetable garden
• Build a pergola for shade

This is the back of the house, these sliding doors lead to the kitchen/dining/living room area. There is a large concrete slab patio which is the perfect blank canvas.

I love the look of these simplified pergolas that are an extended size. I would like to build something similar to these quick sketches and images below…we’ll see what ends up happening.

My brother now lives 5 hours away and I was hoping he could visit and help me but we’ll have to see what travel restrictions are looking like in June to know whether or not that can happen.

Fixer Upper

 

Humphrey Munson

 

Meanwhie these kale seedlings are getting ready for the garden soon. This year I had planned to try growing seeds for the first time. So far, so good but I have a better appreciation of buying plants now!

Lots of other people are working on projects big and small in their homes, here’s the link to see what they’re up to.

 

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At Home: Garage & Front Door Paint Makeover

It’s amazing how quickly and inexpensive it is to transform something with paint. This was a makeover I gave our front door, garage & post with these three small cans of paint.

We have a semi detached home and I wanted our garage door to match with our neighbours so I did a colour match and then painted fake windows along the top. I love the look of windows on garages and since we weren’t going to be replacing ours this did the trick by masking off the lines with tape and using paint from the front door.

This was a really straightforward and inexpensive project that gave the impact I was looking for and worked with what we already had – except for the paint.

Here are updated photos from 2017 after I changed the light fixtures. I was a week before my due date and those nesting instints were the motivation to learn how to change exterior light fixtures…go figure. Anyway it wasn’t too hard to do though I was nervous and it made a huge improvement to the look outside.

A reminder of what it looked like when we moved in – maroon & beige.

I love decorating for the seasons so here’s the garage in winter with a garland I made from the spruce tree in our front yard.