Transforming the Patio/Pool area

Yesterday was a great day.  I hadn't had a free Saturday since the year started--each Saturday I've been going to spin class so that I had a shot at winning the spot in the spinathon.  It worked!  So yesterday I decided that it was more important to take care of some paperwork and housing tasks.

Along the way, I got some writing done, which always makes a day good.  And I read 100 pages of Jill Lapore's One Nation, a wonderful book of American history, which I am reading very slowly, picking it up and reading a bit, getting sidetracked for months, and returning to it. I just finished the part about the Civil War, which is a good reminder that as bad as things seem to be now, they're not as bad as they were just before and during the Civil War.

I got the taxes done--hurrah.  It was less onerous than some years, in part because my spouse and I have done less in the way of side hustles.  I had no writing income to declare, and he had no consulting to city government.  I was not surprised that the standard deduction was higher than our itemized deduction; I knew that the 2017 tax reform bill had almost doubled it.  We are getting a bit of money back.  I was just happy that we're not one of the families that was surprised by having to pay thousands of dollars.

But the best part of the day was our ability to make decisions about furniture for the back patio and pool area.

I have been wanting to get some decent furniture for the back patio/pool area since we first got this house.  My spouse has wanted to wait until we had a complete vision, but never really had a complete vision. Along the way, we tried to make small fixes--you may remember a picnic table set with woven wicker chairs that came apart, as did the replacements that Home Depot sent. We got an additional plastic lounge chair to match the plastic lounge chair that my mom and dad bought for our deck back in 1993.

That newer lounge chair just cracked into unusability (yes, the new one, not the older one). Did that prompt my spouse to be open to the idea of just going ahead and ordering furniture? I don't know.

Yesterday we were finally at a point to think about how we want the back patio/pool area to be--it's one of the spots in the house that we use more than any other. In the morning, I did some searching on Wayfair, which is having a good President's Day sale--I got an idea of what my spouse liked and did some more searching. In the evening, I showed him what I had found, and we made some decisions.

We chose the fire pit not because it was the most attractive, but because it has a grill and thus can do double duty. It's the one thing that I think is a bit ugly. We bought some chairs to go by the firepit, along with some chaise lounges that don't require assembly, and a table and chairs.

I am hoping we will end up with more of a resort feel in the back. I really want to have more of a place where we could relax as we move into summer--especially since it is taking so long to get the inside of the house put back together.  

I should remember to take some before pictures--I'll do that this afternoon. Stay tuned for the transformations ahead!