My Creative Blog:
outdoor DIY

Outdoor furniture can cost an arm and a leg. Since I'm not interested in selling my firstborn to afford nice furniture, we often build it ourselves- and we do the same thing with homeowners on Knock It Off. We wanted to build Barb and Derek a sectional for their sunroom that would have a high end feel and not the price tag.

Doesn't it look great in their finished sunroom?

We are huge fans of giving credit where credit is due- Ana White is the queen extraordinaire of all things DIY furniture! Her blog is full of FREE furniture plans and one of her projects inspired our outdoor sectional.

We didn't use Ana's plans exactly, because we wanted it a certain size for Derek and Barb's room, so we came up with our own version, but if you want to make one, you should follow her step by step directions with awesome pictures!

Ana's plans for an outdoor sectional can be found HERE and you can download a PDF with everything you'll need.
A few tips for making one of your own…
# 1- Have the right tools! You don't need anything extravagant to build this sectional, but a strong drill, a Kreg Jig, and a Chop Saw are essential.

A Kreg Jig is a great, inexpensive tool for building furniture. We used one when we built our farmhouse table, outdoor table, garage lockers and so much more.

It creates a pocket hole to hide your screws.

You can check out Kreg's website here (and no, this isn't sponsored, I just really love this tool!!)
# 2- Have a friend to help! this is a two person job. There are lots of times where you'll need one person to hold and the other to attach something.

# 3- Use Exterior paint or Stain with a Sealant For our sectional, we used exterior paint, but watered it down a bit, so we could still see some of the wood grain. It's a little trick if you're in a time crunch. It spreads easily, like a stain, but you don't have to do an extra coat of sealant. We've learned lots of quick trips doing rooms for Knock It Off.

This project looks amazing and expensive, but it's really simple and a good first project if you're wanting to try your hand at building. All the cuts are straight and the plans are simple (you can thank Ana White for that!)

If you want to see how this sectional looks in the room, click HERE to watch the full episode online.

Hopefully this project encourages you to take that first step and give building your own furniture a try! It will save you a ton of money (maybe even your firstborn!!)

Well, this isn't really a project we had planned on doing right now. Especially since we're still trying to finish the baby's nursery, put the finishing touches on Charlie's room and mentally prepare ourselves for another baby. But, sometimes (ok, lots of times, in my case) we get distracted and something else begs for our attention. Back in May, I posted this picture on instagram saying I didn't know what to do with our deck…

It was a hot mess. Then the arbor thingy you see above broke in a storm, which led us to begin our deck transformation. I'm not kidding when I say I really wanted to tear this deck down because I didn't think it could be redeemed. I mean, we had done some cute projects to spruce it up, like these DIY shutters and window box, but even that couldn't hide the fact that this deck was ugly.

We decided to go ahead and try power-washing it before burning it down (haha-kidding…sort of) to see if that would help at all. It was really beat up, graying, splintery and just plain ugly. Oh wait, I mentioned that already, didn't I? Just take a look:

In the picture below, you can see that the top of the arbor had been removed, but the posts were still there. Plus, there was that one giant bush that was all up in the deck's business too. The first thing we did was cut the posts down and cut back the bush. You wouldn't believe how much that opened things up on the deck.

We borrowed a power-washer from Kevin's grandpop (who owns a painting business) and went to town. Immediately we began to see a major difference!

Ewwww…that gray grime is just disgusting. But the wood underneath was in beautiful shape- I seriously was beyond shocked. Who knew that was under there?

Again I went to instagram to post the progress. Why did we wait six stinkin' years to do this?? And if you don't follow us on Instagram, you totally should. I mean, two posts about a deck should have you banging down our IG doors, we're just that exciting. Follow us at Jess_ec2blog and eastcoastcreative for lots of fun, juicy stuff like deck cleaning.

Anyhow, look at our gorgeous deck now! It's like she was just built yesterday!

Without that big bush and the trellis/arbor thingy (what WAS that thing?) the other side of the deck is wide open…just one big open slate!

(Pssst…did you notice how well my flowers fared in my window box? Ha. They didn't stand a chance.)

Ahhh…I'm in love. With a deck. It's just not right. But it's the truth. The next step is decided what to do with the deck now that it's so fresh and so clean, clean. I'm leaning towards staining the deck a nice gray to go with our gray shutters and painting the railings white. Sort of like this:

Source

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Pretty, right? Kevin's grandpa swears by Sherwin Williams Deckscapes, so we'll probably go that route just because we know it's good stuff. I really like the idea of a semi-transparent stain so that some of the wood grain shows through.

What color would you choose? Have you ever used Deckscapes? Has a power-washer ever changed your life?
I'm hoping to finish this bad boy up this week…that is, unless I get distracted by something else.; )

We were really excited when we heard about this screened in sunroom needed a makeover! We hadn't tackled an outdoor space yet for Knock It Off, and we were bursting with ideas. Here's where things started…

And here's where we ended up… We created a space that was fully comfortable, much more weather-proof, and filled with style- all on a small budget!

Soon we'll post tutorials for the sectional, plant wall, how to paint siding, and the painted rug, but for now, here's some eye candy from the makeover!
This drink station is actually a fold down table. When it's not in use, you can attach it to the wall and it looks like artwork. It was incredibly simple to make and such a great thing to have for entertaining.

We wanted to set this space off as a room of it's own, so we went bold by painting stripes on the exterior siding. It added a huge pop of color and just made the space super cheery (and I know that sounds cheesy, but it's true!). The plant wall was much cheaper than large artwork and also helped with our goal of bringing the outside in!

We were excited that we not only gave the homeowners an entire sitting area with the sectional, but we were also able to give them a little dinette where they could enjoy a meal (or soft pretzel!) outside!

These solar lanterns are from Ikea and you should see how fun they look at night! We added so much mood lighting that we almost wished we could have revealed the room at night! Our producers told us night reveals are a no no: )

And the sectional… ahh we loved how this turned out!! We know many bloggers have built outdoor furniture, but this was our first attempt at it (we didn't mention that to the homeowners of course!!) We basically decided how large we wanted the sectional, did a lot of math to determine how big each piece should be, and then crossed our fingers. Amazingly, it was really simple to build once we had a plan! We'll write a full post on our build within the next week!

If you missed this episode, head over to The Live Well Network for our Knock It Off Page. You can watch the full episodes online HERE.

Stay tuned for all the tutorials coming to EC2 in the next week or so!!
Do tell, what was your favorite part of this Sunroom Makeover?