5 Thrifty, EASY Outdoor DIY Projects!

hey guys it's Andrea from the vlog pine and Prospect home and today I'm going to share five cottage inspired outdoor DIY projects that we have tackled ever since living in our house and you guys know that I'm all about thrifty decor and so many of these projects were so affordable and really just so simple so I thought I would share those with you today you don't have to have a ton of money to create a lot of charm and character in your outdoor space it can be done for a lot less than you think so let's start with the very first project that I want to share with you guys today and that is the reclaimed wood walkway that we have as you enter into our back yard so last summer our church was doing some renovating and we were putting an addition on the side of the church and we had this really long wheelchair ramp that was being torn out and all of that wood was going to go to the dumpster and when I saw that I just couldn't help but think oh my goodness that wood could be used for something great because not only was it pressure-treated wood it was also just really aged beautifully I had this really pretty great patina on the wood and I just I thought okay I would like to take that I'm not sure what we're gonna do with it but let me just take it and see if we can come up with some things well we came up with a lot of different projects before that would my husband ended up building a playhouse for the boys out of that wood and then we created this walkway so this project was really simple in fact I did most of it myself my husband wasn't home when I started on it but I just took a shovel and I dug up a rectangular area that led to our fence gate and I only really made it as deep as the boards were so about 2 to 3 inches deep once all of the sod was out we laid down some landscape fabric and then we just laid the boards down and we space them apart and and between the board's we filled that area with pea gravel now I will say that a year later we're having some weeds pop up in between our boards so don't be like us invest in the nice landscape fabric not the cheap stuff but I just love the way this project turned out it was so simple and adds so much charm and character to our backyard entrance on that side of the house and we have planted some different varieties of hydrangeas a couple of snowball hydrangeas on the one side of the fence which will grow to be very large and then on the front part of the fence we planted some Annabelle hydrangeas I believe that's what they are that a neighbor gave to us this spring which I thought was so sweet so once all of that sort of fills out and starts to kind of creep over the walkway it'll be so beautiful and I'm sure that'll take a few years but I'm just excited to see all of those plants mature around that beautiful walkway so the second DIY project that's outdoors and very cottage inspired is a DIY bench that we made next to our grill and you guys you can hardly call this a DIY project it's so easy and I should have talked to my husband before I did this video but basically all we did was stack up some blocks they aren't cinder blocks and they aren't pavers they're thicker than pavers and they're about seven to eight inches thick and about a foot long and we literally just stacked them up and laid a pressure-treated board across them that's it and I love the concrete mixed with the wood I love how both have sort of aged over time and the pressure-treated board has this really pretty patina now and concrete always just feels really rustic on the patio area and really beautiful I love using natural elements like that whenever I'm adding things to our back patio area and so if you are in need of a bench for your outdoor space consider this project it is seriously so simple and I just love how this bench looks right there next to our house my husband loves sitting there every time he's grilling so super easy cottage inspired DIY this third project that I wanted to share with you guys is actually one that I mentioned in my thrifty cottage shed makeover and that is the stone planter that we made and basically it was free for us now I realize you would have to go out and find some stone for this project we actually found our stone at a garage sale out of all places I made a trade with a friend who is having a garage sale I was having one at the same time she had some stone that I wanted I had some plates that she wanted so we just traded and so I got the stone for free and we used a lot of it around our front porch three or four years ago now I love the way it looks out there it's so beautiful and adds so much charm to the front of our home but I wanted to incorporate the rest of it somewhere and I loved the idea of potentially using it at our backyard so we happen to have some large cinder blocks just sitting in our shed they were left here from the previous owners and we stack them one on top of the other and just used some outdoor liquid nails it's like a landscaping glue we'll see how well this planter holds up I'll tell you guys I'll oh I'll give you guys posted next next spring if it lasts through the winter but literally all we did was pretty much like glue these stones to the cement blocks to create a planter then I just took some plastic and I poked some holes in the bottom of it for drainage of course filled the planter with some potting soil and we planted some flowers in it and it was such a simple DIY project I mean it took a little bit of figuring out you've got a kind of puzzle piece the stones together but really it was a simple project and it adds so much charm and character shed no it's so beautiful and it was absolutely free for us so very cottagey you know stone always reminds me of those old English cottages I love it so that's my third outdoor DIY for you today the fourth DIY project that I want to share with you guys that is very cottage inspired in my opinion is our raised flower beds that we built on the one side of our shed and I know I've already mentioned this in previous videos in posts but you can probably guess where we got all of that wood it was from the same batch that I got the wood for the walkway and these were 2 inch by 12 inch boards really long boards again beautifully aged and my husband didn't even miter the edges I just told him nope just screw the ends to the sides and make it really simple and of course we filled those with some dirt that we got from an excavating company actually which saved us a lot of money we called a local a couple of different local landscape companies and it was so expensive to have a dirt delivered but we called an excavating company and it was like a quarter of the price we could not believe the difference for for dirt so just a little extra tip for you guys if you're needing a lot of dirt maybe look into some excavating companies but they delivered a big load like two to three yards was plenty and we filled up the boxes and planted some beautiful sort of English cottage inspired flowers I went with flowers like foxglove and cat mint and lavenders delphinium some creepy blacks and so I'm so excited for those beds to sort of fill out over the years I would love to incorporate roses at some point and maybe have them crawl up onto the shed I don't know we'll see but um I love those gardens they're so beautiful and um I can't to fill out and it was such a simple and cheap DIY okay so the last project that I want to share with you guys is actually one that I'm looking at right now and it's one that we tackled recently um it's not 100% finished my husband has to do a few more things but basically we are in the process of refinishing our basement and I plan to take you guys along and show you all the steps that we're going to make to get there right now we're sort of still in the phase of like trying to update our plumbing things that aren't really so pretty um building some storage shelves things like that but one issue we were having is that on this side of the house the way that the roof line is we had water every time there was a rainstorm just pouring off of the roof and really saturating the ground and what was happening is we were noticing some moisture in our basement not flooding or anything like that not even really a lot of pooling of water but just moisture after the rainstorms that we had so we were looking into potentially getting some gutters and my husband was going to install them himself and literally the day we were about to get them I happened to call my dad and talked to him and he said Andrea I used to clean out gutters in high school and gutters can cause a lot of long-term problems and that was just you know he said I don't want to sway you one way or the other but he used to clean them out and they get filled with sludge in the spring and then in the winter they'd filled with ice and sometimes they would damage people's you know roofs and so he said maybe look into something else on the ground where the water could sort of drain away from the house well we thought okay well we're all for that you know we don't want to cause more problems down the road so we started to do some research and we came up with the idea of creating this DIY Dry Creek and basically what we decided to do was get some stone and create a wave so that when the water foul it would hit this creek bed and run away from our home and so we happen to have a farmer that attends our church and we asked them if they happen to have any extra field stone and he said he had tons of it and we could take as much as we want so he took a trip out to the farm a couple trips actually used my father-in-law's truck filled it up with field stone and brought it back to the house my husband laid down plastic fabric so that once the water hits this creek bed you know it'll sort of hit that plastic and then run down the slope of our property and away from the house and we have had a couple of really bad rainstorm assistance installing this dry creek bed and we have had no moisture in the basement the water just runs down the stones and away from our home which is exactly what we are trying to accomplish so not only that but it's also beautiful I love seeing all this extra stone next to my house now we're planning on doing the same thing on the other side of the home we don't seem to have as many moisture shoes on that side for whatever reason but it's really done a wonderful job so far of keeping the moisture out of our basement and I just love the way it looks and other than the plastic fabric that we bought the stone was absolutely free so a really super low cost DIY that's absolutely beautiful and so cottage inspired in my opinion to have all these stones on the side of our house like this it's really beautiful in fact I'm going to share this probably in a future video but I loved the stone so much that we're starting to add it to the border of our patio we have a pea gravel patio that was all ðï wide everything in our backyard is DIY the patio the table I get asked about a lot that was a DIY project my brother-in-law actually helped me build it one year to surprise my husband for Father's Day the little bench there is a DIY project so anyways we are starting to pull up the pavers that we originally laid down that border our patio and we are putting that same fieldstone as a border instead and it's looking so beautiful like I said I'll give you guys an update once we complete that but I really love the way it's looking well I hope you enjoyed this blog post with all of these really thrifty cottage inspired outdoor DIY projects I really love the way our patio has come together over these last 8 years that we've lived in our home it did not happen overnight every single summer we added maybe one more thing and I think that's important to keep in mind you know not everything happens quickly you know for some of us we have a tight budget and we can only tackle things a little bit at a time and so I just I think it's so beautiful when you use reclaimed materials and natural elements it looks like our patio has been there for years even though it really hasn't so keep that in mind as you tackle those those projects outside look for you know reclaimed materials keep an eye out on the side of the road if people are tearing something down maybe a barn or something like that see if you can use the material for something in your in your back yard so I do plan on doing a back yard patio tour with you guys there's just to show you everything we've done over the last eight years since living here I know you saw a lot of it in the cottage a shed makeover there's not too much more to show you but I thought it would be fun to just walk you through this area because it has honestly become my favorite place to be every evening in the summertime we recently put up a hammock which we've been loving I could just lay out there every single night and the perfect spot so anyways I hope this video is to help you and I hope it inspired you guys to get 50 and get creative with those outdoor DIY projects you don't have to spend a ton of money you don't need to buy brand new so yeah well thank you guys so much for watching as always if you are new here I'd love for you to subscribe and I'll see you guys next time bye bye

Channel: Pine and Prospect Home

Views: 393,685

Rating: 4.8534288 out of 5

Keywords: Outdoor projects, thrifty outdoor projects, cheap and easy outdoor projects, cheap outdoor projects, easy outdoor diy projects, exterior diy, home exterior diy projects, cottage style outdoor projects, cottage style backyard, cottage inspired patio, back patio inspiration, simple backyard projects, easy backyard diy, backyard ideas, cheap outdoor ideas, affordable backyard projects, cottage farmhouse style, stone planter, diy outdoor bench, dry creek bed, reclaimed wood

Id: 0oEgTyEoFFY

Length: 14min 34sec (874 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 17 2020