Design in My Home Project: Budget Friendly Landscaping

When sweet hubs and I found our darling little bungalo, we fell in love immediately. It was the perfect size for us (it's a small house and coming from NYC, we didn't need a cavernous space to fill with excess "stuff".) It's not a newly renovated place, but its got a lot of charm. That also meant it needed a little elbow grease, specifically on the outside, which Jesse was itching to get his hands on. It had been so long since we'd had our own outdoor space, that doing little bits of landscaping was one of the major appeals of the house. Keep in mind, this is also landscaping from a couple of novices... the most either of us has ever really done with regard to landscaping was raking or cutting the grass. 

Over the last month, we've become best friends with our local Lowe's store. We've done little bits here and there, and finally, the front is now starting to take some shape. We didn't have a huge budget, and to be honest, didn't really want to spend a lot of money on a rental property, so I wanted to share the little things we did, that made a big impact.

First off, this was what we started with:

Full frontal of the house. Note the overgrown landscape beds and unruly, unpruned trees and plants.

Close up of the overgrown and dead leaf filled landscape beds.

Close up of the walkway landscape bed and vine impressions left on the brick.

It wasn't terrible, by any means, but it could have looked better. A lot better. So here's what we've done...

- Raked out and mulched the landscape beds. (Cost: $2.50 x 10 bags of 2.2 cu ft brown mulch = $25.00

- Sprayed down all of the sidewalks and stairs with water (Cost: Free)

- Cut the grass (Cost: Free)

- Pruned the trees and pulled weeds from the landscape beds (Cost: Free)

- Planted five ornamental grass plants (Miscanthus sinensis 'Variegatus') in the small landscape bed by the front walk (Cost: $3.00 x 5 plants = $15.00)

- Placed three solar powered lights in the small landscape bed by the front walk (Cost: $2.50 x 3 lights - $7.50)

- Planted a geranium plant and a salvia plant in two planters that we found (Cost: $9.00 for the geranium, $1.50 for the salvia = $10.50)

- Planted a small container herb garden with mint, dill, rosemary and chives (Cost: $3.50 x 3 plants, $1.25 for packet of dill seeds, $4.77 for a small bag of potting soil, $6.96 for a black heavy duty plastic urn = $23.48)

- Threw down some grass seed in bare areas on the lawn (Cost: $10.14 x 2 bags of shady grass seed = $20.28)

GRAND TOTAL: $101.76

We still have a few things we want to do to the front - the main thing being that we need to put two pieces of landscape timber to finish the front bed (you can see this on the walkway shots). Once we buy the timber, we'll be right around $105. Not too shabby!

Another project for a little later on is that we want to scrub off the vine remains on the house, but we need to figure out a strategy for that (to power wash or to scrub brush).

Here's the final product (until we decide to do more):

I love the dark brown mulch - t adds some much needed contrast to the front of the house.

Close up of one of the landscape beds.

Close up of the brown mulch.

You can see where we need to lay the landscape timber on the left side. Also, I just love the ornamental grass!

Close up of the geranium and the salvia plants.

Ornamental Grass

My sweet little herb garden. (I'm very excited about this.)

Design in My Home Project: Recovering Our Dining Room Chairs

Recently, sweet hubs and I acquired a fantastic mid-century modern dining set from his mother for our new home. In addition to a dining table with a removable leaf and six chairs, the set also includes a beautiful credenza, which unfortunately won't fit in our small home's dining space, so that will be saved for the day we buy our first house.

The dining set is in pretty great shape, considering it's age and the fact that between it being used and it coming into our possession, it was living under a bed for a few years.  It needed a little love and was be back in fine condition in no time.

Hey look! It's the first interior reveal of the house:
the dining room, which we painted in Behr's "Desert Cactus"!

Our first step to bringing the set back to its former glory was to recover the chairs. We recently went on the hunt for fabric that would fit stylistically with it but also give it a little bit of a modern flair. Our search unveiled lots of gorgeous fabric in many styles, colors and textures - but we couldn't find something just right - it all seemed to be missing the most important thing on our search - our budget!  For those of you unfamiliar with purchasing fabric - yes, it can absolutely be an incredible solution to freshen up a piece of furniture or a room on a budget, but it can also get very expensive, very fast, especially when you have champagne taste (in fabric) as I do.

Anyhow, after lots of searching, both online and in-stores, in New York City as well as Atlanta, I came across a fabulous little website called Newtoto. It was perfect on several levels: reasonably priced, had lots of options for modern prints and most of them were heavy duty (ie. resists spills and tears - perfect for cats and messy eaters). They even allowed you to order free swatches. I picked out my top three favorites and three days later I had my swatches in hand.

(Fabrics Left to Right: "Network - Frost" Terratex Panel Fabric $7.50/yard, "Maxim - Sesame" Crypton® Jacquard $10.64/yard, "See Saw - Granite" Crypton® $6.50/yard)

And the winner was: See Saw in Graphite! It was absolutely perfect. The moment my grubby little fingertips touched its thick, beautiful texture I was in love. Yes, I fall in love easily, especially when wonderful textures are involved.

But I digress... I got online and ordered my fabric immediately.

Fast forward to 5 business days later...

The day that our delivery was scheduled to arrive, sweet hubs and I ventured to Hancock Fabrics and our luck was with us - they were having a 40% off sale on foam! We walked out of there with four pieces of foam to start recovering our chairs as soon as our shipment arrived that evening.

And once we got home, our fabric was at our door. We then began recovering.

This was what we started with:

The chair before, which was covered in a red vinyl
that just didn't match our color scheme at all.

Sweet hubs and I then disassembled the first chair (unscrewed the seat from the frame) and took off not one, but two layers of different fabric and multiple layers of batting and foam - some of which I'm sure was from 1970 - and removed all of the staples left from the previous recovers.

Sweet hubs removing staples.

After removing the staples, we cut the foam to the size of the board. Once that was done, we cut the fabric. I don't know about anyone else, but I always get so nervous making "the first cut". Be it wrapping paper, fabric or cake, I'm always nervous that I'll mess it up.

Sitting on my knees, taking a deep breath before cutting the fabric.
Very dramatic, I know.

Once the fabric was cut, next was stretching the fabric over the foam and board and stapling it to the back. It's not nearly as difficult as it sounds - you just have to be careful to make sure you eliminate ripples and whatnot on the corners when you're stapling. And stretch the fabric tight. You want it to be nice and smooth. (I failed to capture any photos of the starting point since we were both doing this at the same time, but when you're doing this, your fabric is on bottom with the correct side (the side you want showing) down on flat on a surface. You stack the foam and then the board on top. When stretching and stapling, you want to start with one side, then do the side opposite of that, and so on. It keeps the fabric taught.

This is what it should look like mid-way through (keep in mind we had a little too much fabric left over, hence sweet hubs trimming it):

After you finish, you simply place the cushion back on the frame and screw it back on.  Voila!

I'm not going to lie - this was my first time recovering a chair. It was surprisingly easy, once we figured out the logistics. And when I say we, I mean that after the first chair, sweet hubs decided that he enjoyed recovering that first chair so much that he actually took over the project and finished the rest of them solo.

I'm a lucky lady. I'm even luckier because now I have a rad dining set.

That's all for now folks!