A Courtyard Patio Makeover – Part 1

I love Spring in Minnesota!

All the trees are turning green, the grass is perfect for walking on with barefeet, and I’m getting ready to plant annuals! Soon, our entire property will look like it’s had a green makeover!

This year, it’s not just our yard, landscaping, and flower gardens I’m working on – I’m also giving our courtyard patio a makeover. And I am having a BLAST doing it!

Our courtyard patio is in the front of our house, overlooking the woods, my front flower garden, and a secluded, tucked away pond. It’s the most peaceful place to sit in the evenings, listening to the frogs and owls, and watching the stars in the wide open sky.

That patio usually has our patio furniture and a couple of candles, along with planters filled with plants. We’ve enjoyed it this way for quite awhile, but this year, I wanted to take it a step further and make it feel like a “room” versus just a patio. Here’s a photo of the chairs and planters (just out of storage) – planters haven’t been cleaned out from last year yet.

I began my search for a coffee table and end table that I could use outside. Not patio furniture, but furniture you would find inside in a living room – yet could survive being outside in the elements. After lots of searching, I finally found the perfect set on Facebook Marketplace – both pieces for $40! The color wasn’t right for our decor, but the furniture is made of metal and glass and is very heavy duty.

I bought outdoor spray paint that matches the color of our house perfectly. My sons and my husband cleaned, prepped, and spray painted the set for me. This was a LOT of work, since the table bases are made of bent round iron rods with many, many, many nooks and crannies. Cleaning and painting was a very tedious, time consuming task – but the result looks PERFECT!

Afterwards, of course the coffee table and end table didn’t match our patio chairs, so we cleaned and prepped them, then masked off the fabric of the chairs and my husband painted them with the same paint as the tables. Now they look great together! The chair fabric is a two-toned weave, and the old chair color matched the dark tone perfectly. Ironically, the new paint color now perfectly matches the light tone of the fabric! My husband was very relieved he didn’t have to re-cover the chairs with new fabric. 😉

I spent over a week trying to find rugs for the patio, our main entrance, and our service entrance areas. I wanted something that would stand out, but still be neutral in those areas. And… since black and white are my favorite colors, it made sense to find rugs in those colors. The rugs are actually not a pure white, but rather an off-white, and I actually like that better.

Here’s a photo of the patio in “Stage 1”. The furniture is painted to match, the rug is in place, and I’ve started to decorate the tables. I’m super excited to get plants in the planters, get the fountain put back together, and add more detailed finishing touches! It’s getting there!

Here is a photo of “Stage 1” from the sidewalk. Ignore that solar patio light stuck in one of the concrete pillars – someone put it there to get it out of the way. LOL! The bricks on the patio are pillars that raise up my flower planters (not shown because they need to be painted and then planted),  because the hostas in front of them are large enough in the Summer that they would hide the planters. The urns are still empty, eagerly awaiting the plants I’ll be getting soon. The hostas between the patio and the sidewalk are just starting to come up. Soon, they will fill that space with their variegated white and green leaves. Once the planters are on the patio and the hostas fill in, they form a living “fence” around the patio and make it feel even more like a room. Once I get all this work done, THEN I can shop for plants and get planting!

The stone planter on the coffee table has silver leaf applied to the top portion to give it some flair. I need to apply silver leaf to a couple other stone planters too. The head statue on the end table needs hair! I’m still trying to figure out what kind of plant to place in that head. The cement mourning dove on the coffee table was my Mom’s. In our family, mourning doves are a symbol of the people we love who have passed. I like having Mom’s dove out there!

The main entry area on the right is a big space, that I plan on adding some special touches to as well! The service entrance is on the left – you can just barely see it in this photo, but there’s a better shot of it in a photo below.

Here’s a photo of the tables and some of the plants I’ve started putting out there. I’m using bright shiny silver and silver leaf as the accent color. The flagstone path leading off the patio goes to flagstone steps that lead down to the Butterfly Garden. The top part of the white arbor you can see is the entrance to the Butterfly Garden. Once you wind through the Butterfly Garden, there is a flagstone path that leads to our back patio, another flagstone path that leads to our fire-pit area, and yet another flagstone path that leads to our pool area. There is a seating area in the Butterfly Garden too, and I am hoping to paint the cast iron bistro set there in a color to match the front patio chairs. That’s another project….

Here’s a photo of “Stage 1” of the service entry that’s a work in progress. It’s a semi-protected entry, and the bench makes the perfect place to sit outside when it’s raining – we don’t get wet there! I LOVE the rug I picked for this spot! I have the same rug for the main entrance area too. The small table will be painted, and a real slate chalkboard hung from the metal frame – that’s where we write welcoming messages to our guests. The pansies are on the newly painted plant table on the right temporarily, until I get the tall and colorful coleus plants I usually have on that stand. The bottom shelf of that stand will hold an old cement statue head I have. I am also making kokedama balls with ferns in them to hang in this space, along with smaller urns that will bring even more greenery to this area! A future project will be to stain the concrete of the steps and patio surfaces, for a glossy finish with swirls that make it look like marble, in a color that closely matches the house and the quoins. Oh… and that handsome little kitten at the door is Ernie! He’s such a cutie!

I am having SO much fun putting this all together, and I’m not done yet!

In addition to some unique and fun accent pieces I’m working on, next will come the plants! That’s one of my favorite parts of Spring. Every year I choose different annuals for the front flower gardens and planters, but always in an off-white and pale yellow color scheme. This year, I might switch things up a bit and go with off-white and lime green flowers – depending on what I can find. I usually have very tall flowering vines in the urns on either side of the library windows – white flowers, of course. But I might go with large black elephant ears this year, again, depending on what I can find locally.

I’ll post Part 2 of this article as more progress is made. Stay tuned!

And if you ever want to hang out with me on the patio some evening, just let me know. I have wine!

Cheers for now….