If you’ve been following along on the backyard updates, you know that there are two big things going on:
- I’ve brought in dirt and rented a backhoe to help me fix a number of lingering issues going on back there: fill in a sinkhole, grading, etc. It’s a shitload of work.
- I’ve brought in a LOT of DIRT. Which… is going to look really brown for a while before it gets better (I’ll get to the grass seeding part of the update eventually, but my landscaper neighbor advised a wait about a month). And that part kind of sucks, no matter how much I know it’s eventually going to pay off.
Sometimes when I’m in the middle of a big makeover, I waffle (hehe) between these highs and lows. That anticipation of how it’s going to look someday versus the hot mess that it looks like right now can be a little more disheartening than I’d like, and I have to put in effort to make sure that I don’t give up halfway through. As a pick-me-up, I will simultaneously work on something with a shorter wait time for the big payoff. (This post contains a few affiliate links, which help support this site at no additional cost to you while I simultaneously recommend the stuff I like. For more, see my disclosure page.) And that’s the logical explanation for how I found myself staining Adirondack chairs and making over planters for a deck I haven’t even built yet.
A word about staining things like this: maybe wipe-on Waterseal isn’t the way to go. The nooks and crannies tend to make everything a giant mess, and apparently, I’m not a good enough planner to reach for a pair of latex gloves sometimes.
Luckily (???), I got frustrated enough with chair number one to try a spray version for chair number two (similar). It did the job a lot better for reaching into the tighter areas and in a lot faster time. And my hands didn’t look like that.
The color, by the way, is called Acorn Brown. I wanted something more brown than red, and this was the closest match to what I had in mind.
I like them so much, I think I might order two more to get a full set of four. And as luck would have it, they are on sale right now with an extra 10% off for Labor Day weekend. So, I’m pretty sure two of those are going to wind up magically walking themselves out of the online cart and on their way to my front door. There are also these foldable versions that look almost the same, but I’m not quite sure yet.
I then stumbled onto some planters on clearance at Lowe’s ($6.98 each – more than 50% off until the end of October). I kind of love it when things go on sale just because of the color (the silhouette on these are really simple, so the only difference seemed to be that the red and blue ones had been selling better). My gain!
Equally funny to me is how they were clearly manufactured in black (you can see based on the inside of them in the above photo) and that’s the color I actually wanted. So, these ugly yellowish things have been spray painted black with some outdoor plastic spray paint, which makes for a pretty nice upgrade. Or downgrade… back to its roots. Whatever. The important thing is, they’re black now and they look better that way.
I should have another post for you guys on Sunday regarding the stools in the kitchen that are going under the new bar area. I just figured out how to use my router again, so it’s finally going to get finished and installed. Woot!
The post Staining Tips for Adirondack Chairs and New Planters appeared first on The Ugly Duckling House.
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