Tuesday, September 6, 2011

Benches

Our heat finally broke over the weekend!  Cooler days and nights lent a giddy atmosphere to the most mundane of tasks.  Stepping outside was no longer similar to opening your oven door.  Ahhh.  It is just bliss.  I did yoga in my backyard every day over the long weekend -- some days twice.  And more than once I laid out back and read my book under the trees.  Just me, Greta and the birds.  It really goes a long ways towards getting re-grounded and back to basics.

The idea of Fall and being able to spend time outdoors gave me motivation to finish up retro-fitting the benches from my neighbors' deck to accompany my cedar dining table in the backyard.  Red came over to help.  It was a fun project to fool around with -- not difficult aside from some crazy saw angles -- but having another set of hands sure made manuevering the long benches easier.

Here is the end product -- so nice to have the cement blocks out from under the benches...



They rest a bit unevenly because the ground is uneven -- once again, welcome to my sloped yard.  I'll try the benches out a few times, and if they seem too unsteady I'll even out the ground some.  I'm also going to re-apply the mahoghany stain to the table top, and apply it for the first time to the benches.  If you look at the table base in the top photo you can see the color of the stain before the sun faded it.  It's a deep, rich brown that will match my backsteps.

I'm looking forward to finally hosting a neighbor dinner party as the nights cool off!  My nearby potting table can serve as a buffet, and I'll get the copper bowl fire pit out.  I'd like to get the car port wall treatment done too, as a backdrop, but we'll see how fast that happens.

I did a bit of work on my interior door frame this weekend as well, but neglected to snap photos.  I'll try to remember to do that tonight.

2 comments:

Leigh said...

They look great! What a wonderful addition to any yard. They will be so pretty when they're stained. Sounds like your dinner party planning is well under way.

Project Girl said...

Thanks Leigh, I'm excited to finally have them usable. I was going to stain them last night and realized I didn't have enough stain leftover -- need to make a Home Depot dash. And of course now I'm thinking about cushions... the project that never ends...