About a month ago, Nathan came out of project retirement thanks to the boredom of staying home from COVID, and approached me with an idea to switch up our patio. He had always envisioned making the rectangular side of our patio more of a set aside space that would lend itself to an outdoor picnic set or table and chairs.

Per usual, I was terrible at taking “before” pictures. I just want to get to the end result! Here’s a look from last year at what this area looked like:

We re-homed both the hydrangea you can see on the far back left of the above picture, and the boxwood on the far right corner to new homes for this project. Then, Nathan built a couple of cedar planters to put in the corners instead.

We lined the inside of the planters with plastic fish pond material to protect the wood as much as we could against the water we’d use for the plants up top. Stained the cedar, and anchored them directly into the dirt. The inside was then primarily filled with gravel to allow for good drainage, and each one has a Home Depot bucket (as seen above) filled with concrete and a metal pole stuck in it.

The remainder of the planter was filled with potting soil once we had eyeballed the height of the posts and ensured they were level.

Nathan used a wire line to attach to the top of the pole and ran it up to a hook in the mortar of our brick fireplace exterior, and then attached lights to the string using zip ties. I filled the planters with sun-loving plants. 🙂

A dreamy little eating area on our patio finished.

Sources:

Planters: Made by Nathan – used cedar wood

Stain: Ready Seal – Natural Cedar – 2 coats

Bistro lights: Brighton Patio Lights

Plants in Planters: Daisies – Golden Butterfly, Purslane Portulaca – Pazzaz Nano Yellow & Pazzaz Nano Hot Pink