Oops…I did it again…

O’my, what 2 buckets of seashells from going to the beach on the weekends and a gallon of $9 “oops” granite texture paint for concrete from my local home improvement store inspire me to do. I’ll tell you, I love going to the paint department every time I go to my favorite orange home improvement store, for you guys that live in the states you know who I am talking about. I love, so love the oops paint, clearance paint rack, paints that were custom mix and the customer did not buy for any reason, all I know is that I have almost painted my entire interior of my house with these paints for a fraction of the price. So back to the 2 buckets of seashells, I always collect seashells when I go to the beach, I don’t know why I just do and then I have a massive amount of seashells with no purpose ah, till now. I decide to use some of my seashells for stepping stones and then I thought maybe I should use regular stepping stones and do a little sitting area with some stones, the hammock posts are set around and it would be a cool hang out area. While at the store shopping for the plain concrete stepping stone I swung by the paint department and found, you guessed it oops paint, 1 gallon of black granite texture paint for the patio on the clearance rack for $9, omg, got to get. I figure I might as well cover that ugly red-brown color stain that I did last year, what was I thinking, oh, it was an oops paint, they don’t always work as expected but it was $7 to seal the concrete at that time, it was not bad for a year.

I began my mission by making the stepping stone molds and scavaging up all the cement and mortar in the garage that my husband wanted me to get rid of, this is when hoarding is good. I had some scrap wood and made two molds, used plastic for the bottoms and viola there’s one in the background there and one of the molds.

some of my supplies on my kid’s old radio flyer wagon, I use this wagon for everything :), by the way, there’s that ugly red-brown floor.

Stepping stone making.

Mosaic stepping stones with seashells.

Then I tackled the grass removal where I wanted the concrete stepping stones. I already had buried a PVC pipe with concrete to place a patio umbrella last year, I knew wanted to do something there but was not sure what, you can see one of the posts that I had put in when I first moved in as part of my hammock and bench swing project.

I did some dry fitting & marked the area that I needed to dig and proceed to dig up the lawn 2 days later I finally finish digging because of the extreme humid- heat and did I mention pouring rain. After that, I place commercial grade fabric and sand – didn’t take a picture of that. Placed all the stepping stones and river rocks.

Moved the patio furniture from the enclosed patio to this area and purchased a new umbrella – (I did not have a picture without the furniture that later got moved over, this one is from after the enclosed patio was painted). 1 project down!

Next was clearing the enclosed patio cleaning it and getting it ready to paint, I pressured cleaned it and waited 2 days to dry.

Before

I was able to paint in a few hours, no big deal.

It looks better already! The patio chairs in the background started crying for new fabric, oh no. Time to move everything back but wait I have not furniture I moved the table and chairs to the new sitting area…

I went to order some furniture and I also ordered some new outdoor fabric to re-upholster the four chairs and the bench swing seat. The fabric I purchased from, where I always order my fabric fabricguru.com (love them- best deal in Sunbrella fabric). Here’s the fabric.

took a set of the old cushions that I had reupholstered a year ago to use for a pattern, once they were all cut I sewed away by the time they were finished, the new patio furniture arrived.

So here’s the whole thing…