Weekend patio and potting shed makeover!

After such a long, cold winter it sure feels good to get outside again! I love sitting out on my patio and working in the garden, and being a vintage lover those things are even more fun when I try to incorporate some of my finds.

You all probably know I have a thing for vintage lawn furniture and my collection grows all the time. You may remember some of my finds from last winter- it's so frustrating to get cool lawn furniture and have to put it away until warm weather!

Finally I got to bring them all out, scrub them down and put out the cushions!

In the back left corner is my weekend project. I always wanted a water feature and figured out a way to use some of the things I already had to make one.

The fountain was a tabletop fountain I got as a wedding present (almost 10 years ago!) and is no longer practical to have indoors due to the little ones knocking it over and making a mess. It had been sitting in the basement for years unused. I picked up the galvanized washtub last fall at a rummage sale for $1- I love its patina. (I have a fondness for galvanized stuff, as you will see...). And the washtub stand I pulled out of the neighbor's dumpster last Mother's Day. The plants were free- we have a boggy area in our backyard and just picked some horsetail rush and the leafy stuff (that's the scientific name, LOL) there. So the whole thing cost me $1 to make.

It added the perfect element of bubbling water to the patio without costing me a fortune or looking too "new" (I hate that).

That done, I turned my attention to the potting shed, or barn, as we call it. The barn is really just that; when we moved in the previous owners had kept a pig in there. It's quite large, probably 400 sq feet and three rooms but only one story. We can park our tractor and all our outdoor furniture in there, and it's where I keep my larger treasures until I can use them. We put quite a bit of work into this building the first year we lived here, adding a new roof, siding, and rebuilding the back wall that had been constructed out of an old Gulf billboard. (Wish that still had the graphics but it had been painted over-you could just make out the outlines of the letters.) I tried to keep the vintage bones intact, though.

It is also the place where the kids keep their bikes, wagons, Tonka toys, Power Wheels (for a while we had 4- now we're down to 2), etc. It kind of just became a mess of junk. And the whole thing was home to numerous birds and mice. Blech.

I'm sure many of you subscribe to Country Living and Flea Market Style magazines, and like I, you probably fantasize about having some of those outdoor spaces. I'm sure many of them are staged just for the magazine and are not normally as fascinating as they look, but it's good inspiration, nonetheless.

So I spent a long afternoon on Sunday with a shop vac and rags cleaning up the mess and organizing my part of the shed so I have a place to work on my treasures. I think it cleaned up pretty well- and wish I had taken some "before" pics. I need to add some softer touches with linens and things, but it's on its way:

Told you I love galvanized stuff! And that thing on the right that looks like a giant eyeball is a searchlight off a Navy ship. It works- someday I will find a use for it!