Project: Back Porch – Update

Sorry to leave you hanging on the back porch project!  We hit a road block, then had some bad weather, and the porch kind of fell out of mind.  But we have made progress, which I am pleased to share:

Note the layer of what appears to be dust on the bistro set table – that is pollen, and it is the reason for my regular sneezing fits and bouts of lightheadedness.  Thanks, spring!

Anyway…  The rugs are in place (a second one starts at the end of the one shown, to cover the remainder of the porch), and we finally tried out our paper lanterns over the weekend.

For the lanterns, I just strung up some jute from preexisting hooks (sometimes renting comes with freebies!), which we’ll leave up all the time.  The lanterns are on little plastic hooks, so are collapsed and stowed away in the back hall when not in use.  We actually do have a bright, overhead electric light out there, but the lanterns are much more fun, don’t you think?  Plus, I think the dimmer light will attract less bugs.

Now, about that road block…  The shade I picked out from the H.ome De.pot website apparantly does not exist on this planet.  You cannot order it from the website, and in store…  Well, we went to our local store (which, according to the website, had the shade we wanted in stock) every Saturday for three or four weeks, being told “Come back next week” each time, and every time it wasn’t there.  We were finally told by a surly high school student, who clearly cared that we’d been back three or four times about as much as I would care about a monster truck rally being in town, that they don’t carry the shade at all, and basically won’t ever have it.  After all that, I’m feeling pretty burnt out on the shade.  We’ll find something, I’m sure, it was just very annoying.

So what do you think of the rug and lanterns?  Not bad, huh?