This Little Balcony of Mine

I'm gonna let it shine...but first you have to read a few sentences and see a horrid photo before seeing that sparkling, shimmering, wonderful balcony of shininess.

If you'll recall in this post, I vowed to get my act together, in many aspects - time management, this blog, and *ahem* my dreaded balcony, to name a few.

Do you like that awesome segue? It's something that can't be taught people, sorry.

Well, I finally got around to sprucing it up a bit. It ended up being a place where we put everything we didn't have room for such as bikes, our lawn mower, and other outside related items. Moving from a house to an apartment meant getting rid of stuff (which we did) but even still some of the things we kept didn't have a home so we shoved it all out here, hence the mess. In addition to storing wayward items I use this area all.The.Time. for my little projects. That's why you see wood, paint, screwdrivers, etc in the the above photo.

When the movers came to pack Seth's household goods (if you don't remember, he PCS'd to NC and the Air Force won't let me join him until next year) they took quite a bit of the stuff from the balcony, leaving much more room for me to build more stuff finally clean it up. The photo above makes the task look much worse than it actually was, I simply took everything that was left after the movers took the majority of the things out there and slid it inside so that I could sweep and paint the floor. After letting that dry for about three days I moved our chairs and table back out there, cleaned out the kids' sand/water table, planted some flowers, and called this puppy done!

The difference is cray-cray. Sing with me ...that shiiii is bananas, b-a-n-a-n-a-s. Love me some Gwen.

This little makeover didn't cost me a dime since the paint was leftover from painting my living room walls last year and I simply put everything I already had back on the balcony. Actually, I take that back, it cost me about $5 since I bought flowers.

The little ones helped me plant them. We dug through kitchen cabinets looking for flower pots and finally found three.

One was being used as a kool-aid packet holder.

Don't judge us, we were thinking outside the box when I needed to find somewhere to store all the kool-aid.

It was messy but that just meant the kids enjoyed it.

This photo is blurry, but too cute to not include.

And in case you've asked yourself, Wait, you put a water table on a balcony? How are you gonna drain it? Yes, I put a water/sand table out there for the kids to use but I chose to only fill it with sand since I have no way to drain it living on the second floor and all. 

I didn't, however, think it through when I bought three 50 pound bags of sand and then realized I had to somehow get them up to my apartment. Luckily there were some guys helping someone move in my building so I asked their help and they carried it. Apparently watching all that heavy lifting left Jersey needing to rest in the shade.

He really does love it out there. He even makes himself comfortable by taking up 50% of the available seating.

I'm glad I finally got the balcony spiffied up but it's a bit ironic because we are moving in less than a month so I won't get as much use out of it as I intended. It does get plenty of use in the meantime though, between the kids playing, the cat sunbathing, and me drinking a mojito my coffee out there, everyone seems to enjoy the space. And I love that the balcony is screened in so we can be out there without worrying about mosquitos and other critters, and if I'm in the kitchen, the boys are in the living room, and Ari's on the porch we can all still see and hear each other. So we're enjoying it while we're still here.

And I, Lorri Rumbarger, promise to not allow the backyard of the house we move into next month ever even remotely resemble the 'before' version of this little balcony of mine. Scout's honor.