It's Friday!
I hope you have some fun plans out in your garden this weekend!
I wanted to pop in with a little bit of info on how we customized the mulch color for our yard.
My poor patient husband puts up with a lot of indecisiveness from me... and crazy ideas... and I never seem to be content without tweaking or customizing just about everything. When I started working on my post for The Home Depot Patio Style Challenge, I have to admit that I thought about every little detail of how I wanted my yard to look... down to the mulch in the planters. Originally, we had rock in most of our planters that I didn't really care for. I decided that I wanted to remove all of the rock and plant flowers and vines and add mulch for now.
Here is a little before picture to refresh your memory. It is so painful to share this picture!
and here is an after picture:
A little bit of a difference, don't you think!?
I extended the planter to give the illusion that the space is bigger than it is. I also wanted to soften the very harsh lines of the original area by curving the planter. I LOVE the result. It looks so much better.
When it came time to choose between black or brown or red mulch, I wasn't really happy with any of them. They felt too harsh to me for some reason, and maybe a bit unnatural. So when my husband and asked me what color of mulch I wanted him to pick up at The Home Depot... I had to smile and give him a kiss before explaining that it wouldn't be that simple :). He wasn't surprised...
I decided that I wanted to mix the brown and black 50/50, and I am so glad we did! It was a little extra work, but it was so worth the extra effort to get the more natural looking color I was aiming for. Mulch pieces are small enough that it can be mixed without being too obvious or chunky. And if you wanted it to be blacker or browner, you can just increase or decrease your ratios. For instance, for a blacker mix, you could do 1 bag of black to 2 bags of brown. Also, you could create a more softer and natural looking red by mixing a bag of red with a bag of brown.
So here is my pep talk for the day~ Don't be afraid to step outside of the box and tweak things so you LOVE them instead of just like them! You don't have to settle.
To see the rest of the reveal for this space, you can head over to The Home Depot's Apron Blog.
I will continue to share tutorials for this space throughout next week, including:
The PERFECT mix for the PERFECT warm gray stain
Outdoor woodwork: planking
Building a privacy lattice and recommended vines
Recipes
Pillows and cushions
How to incorporate antiques in outdoor decor
Creating our unique color of mulch
and to see the tutorial for how to build the sandwich board chalkboard for under $25 with no painting, click here.
I will also be sharing more updates about our crazy kitchen renovation. The best place to see updates is via Instagram, if you want to follow along!
I hope you have a wonderful weekend!
Melissa De Boer
LOVE your garden work. I just wanted to know what are the vines that you used?
Jennifer Taylor
Oh my goodness Kristen!! I just went over to the Home Depot site! WOW! What a transformation! So stunning.. I can't wait to see it in person! I'm currently working on my backyard right now and this has really inspired me. I don't think Brock will be too happy though 😉 lol