DIY Swing Set Makeover I read somewhere a few years ago about the "backyard season of life", & it never rang true til the last couple of years. We are so in that season. Meaning, so so much of our time is in the backyard. We spend mornings outback eating breakfast together. The girls play the majority of their day out back. After school it the first place they go to. We spend so many nights back here, during the summer & fall several nights a week we are out back with a fire with our smores basket! So here we are smack dab in the middle of the "backyard season" & our backyard just wasn't the place we needed it to be. Our backyard is one of the only things I love about our home. It is HUGE. It flares out like a baseball field & is quite large for a yard in the city & we want to utilize it! We are doing several things back here that I can't wait to share but we are going to start with the swing set! Our girls love it! I swear they could swing for hours! But our swing set, while only about 4 years old..looked terrible. We could have re stained it. But a blog friend, Brooke from Nesting with Grace, painted her swing set, & it was exactly what I was going for! SEE. Terrible. I know lots can compare because we have a very common swing set, & when we see it at other homes that have it had a couple years, it looks just the same as ours. It just doesn't weather well. So-- We are moving soon, so we were torn with just tearing it down, or re doing it. We wanted to replace it but what we want to replace it with, we would want to take with us. & it just seemed silly to do that now. So we decided if we could re stabilize it, & get it looking good it would stay! The kicker is I wanted to do it as cheap as possible! & yall it turned out better than I even expected! First, the day after we got back from Mexico {which is also why the grass is crazy long in the before photos! Then I thought, lets wait to cut it. Gives the before more umpf lol} I started sanding down the swing set. & started to paint! WHITE PAINTED SWING SET WHAT PAINT DID YOU USE? What you normally should use, is a porch or house paint. However, it was $40 so we used barn paint! it was $15! Score! I decided to really let the girls have fun with this, & make it a family project. So they painted the entire thing themselves! They did great! It isn't a perfect paint job, but the girls had a blast & I love the sense of accomplishment they felt & the fun we had as a family doing it all together. I spray painted the green joint, black. Here is Brandon straightening it back out & stabilizing it. It had a bit of a lean! ha! Then we replaced the two swings & monkey bar for 3 wooden swings! Next, we took down the canvas roof & replaced it with a tin roof! Brandon had to add onto the "roof" for the tin to be stabilized. In these photos you can also see where I replaced the yellow plastic handles from the ladder, to barn door handles! It changed the look so much! Now that the main stuff was done, it was time to make it "pretty"! We went to the fabric store & the girls picked out fabric. But after we got home, they asked if I had any material that looked like the runner on the outdoor table, & I had forget I had a curtain panel of that fabric. So I cut it up, & the girls sewed them up all themselves. I scotch guarded them, & hung them with a suspension rod. We took a ply under layment piece that we had laying around & made that into a chalk board on the back park to make a little space a mud kitchen! My girls sit back here & concoct so much things. We went to the dollar store & they got all their mud kitchen essentials! I also got this adorable dinner bell to add on too! Still deciding if that was a good purchase or not as the girls like it...alot. I'm sure our neighbors are thrilled LOL I really wanted to make this look like a little playhouse so adding these solar lights really made the look. They are perfect size for playhouse, easy to install & since its solar there is no wiring or anything! Just some screws! This little Welcome Home sign was the perfect touch to top off the whole thing! Isn't it the cutest? It isn't perfect, but it so perfect for us! The girls live it in it anymore! Resources: Original Swing Set Paint: Behr White Exterior Barn & Fence Paint Swings Dinner Bell Solar Lights Welcome Sign Share This Post Related Posts
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I am discovering that the more that we do to the house, the more we are really honing in on our style. Unfortunately, because we were previously apartment-dwellers, we were unable to paint the walls of our rent-protected cage to begin the journey of throw pillows, curtains, and paint colors that we have been able to trek since buying a home. It's been a truly interesting experience, but unfortunately, sometimes our choices were just off the mark a bit. The largest instance of this so far has been the kitchen. I know that avid readers will be sighing and trying to decide if they still want to read this post to the end, but I promise, this should be the last time you see these cabinets for a long while. As you may remember, one of the first things we did when we moved into the house was clean out and paint up the kitchen cabinets. They started like this. I had decided a long time ago that I loved the modern look of white and gray kitchens, so I headed to the store, picked up a nice bright white and what I thought was a bold gray and started prepping and painting. When I had finished, I ended here. I knew that it was better than they had been when we moved in, so I just left them. This was unfortunately followed by a nagging feeling that they just weren't quite what we had originally wanted, though. They were 'okay'. They were livable. We moved on to other rooms in the house and weren't bothered by the kitchen because it functioned just fine. Then, I saw an article that brought the feelings of gray-cabinet-inadequacy to the forefront again. Better Homes and Gardens February 2014 issue had this full-page image on the last page. I almost missed it, but I'm glad I didn't because it motivated me to make the decision go back and fix that which had never been quite 'right'. It was our kitchen! Well, if ours had the correct bottom cabinet color. Mom and I had briefly dabbled with a darker cabinet paint pot from Home Depot around Thanksgiving, it just needed to be applied. I got out my brush and started in with the rest of the sample. The it-was-meant-to-be part came from the fact that it was actually a custom color that a woman next to us was getting that Mom suggested might be what I was looking for. It was. Mom's know best. Here is the front cabinet half painted. You can clearly see the darker gray on the left. It is a much richer, more grounded color for the room and really makes it feel on purpose. I know it might not seem like a huge jump, but the lighter gray was almost as light as the white upper cabinets, which made it look like we ran out of paint halfway through. This really gives it the higher contrast it needed. When all of the bottom cabinets had been taken off of their hinges (again) and painted (again) and remounted (again), the whole repainting felt worth it. Two samples of paint later, I was finished. Here are some of the after shots. And just because before and afters are so much fun This whole cabinet debacle really helped me to come to grips with the fact that working on your house, whether it's decorating, gardening, or just building a table, might not go according to plan the first time through. I think that refinishing the cabinets in a color that I had always seen in my mind really helped me throw aside the indecision that I had been carrying with me since they had been first 'completed'. It's amazing how much better you feel in a room that fits you mental image of it rather than a 'meh, it's good enough' attitude. Have you ever had a project that you just weren't pleased with for some reason? Did you take the time to fix it? Let me know in the comments!
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