Howdie Peeps

I am home today - sick. I slept pretty much most of the morning and early afternoon and now I am ensconsed on my couch with my puppy and my laptop. Not much going on here at Chez Paisley. It's really beautiful outside and I am so wishing for a deck and some comfy chairs to sit in the sun while I read or blog and sip iced tea.

So, in light of my medicine head state. I thought I would do a little link love - backyard style.

Our backyard is pretty large for a condo. It's somewhat private. Our buiding jogs so that, looking out to the back on the left we have building, on the right we have a privacy fence that wraps around to half of the back yard. It's not fully fenced so I can't let Mr. BJ out by himself.

In the corner of the fence we want to build a deck and I found a great blog post with a deck tutorial and reference to an easy to do deck system. All supplies right down to the stain for her 8 x 8 deck cost around $300. I like that price and our deck will probably be a similar size. Door 16 lives in Newburgh, NY and is remodeling her row house.

We are considering building a corner bench as well. That way will will just need a table and two more chairs. I like this table from Pottery Barn (shown is a set but you can buy the table seperately) and this umbrella. I'm kind of digging the cherry red color.

I would love to top our new deck with a pergola so I can train some climbing vines up on to it but I am not certain we can get away with that here at the condo. If you go on over to Just Beachy you can check out her completed pergola project.

I am growing both Clematis and tumpet vine in my yard and would love it to trail over the pergola.

Next up, we need to move our grill off the cement patio and on to some pavers. That will give us more room on the patio.

Since garage sale season is starting up I hope to be lucky enough to find two wicker or adirondack chairs for the patio. They don't need to match as I plan on painting them black and making some comfy seating out of a few pillows and old quilts or sari fabric I have.

I like how the chairs in the photo above don't match with the exception of their color. I love the green of the table lined and pillows!

As far as plantings, I have the beds pretty full but there is always room for more and seasonal color. I have some pots just waiting to have plants put in them.