Deck Space Makeover October 3, 2020 – Posted in: Decorating, Furniture – Tags: deck space
In addition to our 1400 square feet of indoor space, we’re lucky that our house also has some pretty great outdoor spaces – including a large second-story deck off of our family room. Having all of this bonus living space up in the trees has quickly become one of the “rooms” we’re most thankful for, and you’ll see why in this post.
… so part of our low-maintenance, easy-to-use mission involved finding a way to keep the cushions dry so they could be used, in the words of Shakira, whenever and wherever. So we devised a somewhat unusual but very simple solution:
I have a love/hate relationship with furniture covers. They do their job, but they’re often so bulky that they’re cumbersome to take on & off, their folds can collect water, any excess fabric on the ground can get grimy, plus you have to find a spot to stash them when they’re not in use. So I was determined to find a cover that was lower-profile and easier to wrangle for this outdoor sofa. The eventual answer? This $35 waterproof sun sail shade.
It’s one of those fabric shades meant to be stretched over a deck or porch to offer some shade to the area below. But it was listed as 100% waterproof and available in a size that was perfectly suited to cover the cushions without a lot of excess fabric in the way (this is the key). It means that it’s quick & easy to pull on and off, and when it’s off we can stuff it behind the couch, completely out of sight. In fact it’s back there in all of the after photos in this post – and even the video.
To keep it in place we just ran two short bungee cords under each end of the couch, with each end hooking onto one of the metal rings sewn onto the corners of the shade.
If you look closely at some of the pictures you can see how we keep the bungee hooked on the bottom of the couch when the cover is off, just so we don’t lose the bungee under the couch. Not that it’s hard to retrieve if it slides under, but this just makes it super quick to pull the shade back over when we’re done relaxing and hook it back in place.
They’re SUPER comfy (I sized all of these photos while sitting in one before moving over to the dining table to type this up) but they’re quite deep, so we picked up two of these large 22″ outdoor pillows to fill out the back. The pillows don’t retain water (there’s something about our sofa cushions that are more dense, but these are lighter and they dry so fast). Our plan had been to toss them under the sofa cover if they stayed wet, but even easier, they can just stay out because they’re fast-drying little pillow prodigies.
Beyond this seating area is our outdoor dining/game space, which we talked a little bit about on our podcast. Our old wood table virtually disintegrated in our hands as we tried to load it into our POD while moving (some of the leg connections had rotted through completely so it came apart in our hands when we tried to lift it). We decided to learn from our mistake and purchase this faux-wood table that’s actually aluminum (it’s currently sold out but hopefully will come back into stock sometime).
We’re happy to report that this table has probably gotten more use in the last 3 months than our last one got over the last 3 years. We’re by no means eating every meal up here (the kitchen table gets a ton of use too) but it gets so shady and nice up here in the late afternoon that it has become a taco night tradition to eat up here, and as well as being a favorite “work desk” for Sherry & I with a laptop – and it has also become our favorite family game spot in the evenings.