Let's Go Outside...

In honour of the sun coming out and actually staying out for more than a couple of hours we've been making our outside area as pretty as possible.  We already have our plants, and our first flower, but we wanted to make the space more inviting, seeing as we'll be spending a lot of time out there now summer's begun.

The first flower of summer, ain't she purty!

We had ummed and ahhed over what to do about the concrete floor since we bought the flat.  It's nothing horrific to live with, but it does have a weird large paint stain that's sort of indented into the concrete (no idea how it happened) so it's a wee bit unsightly.

 My feet are totally there for size reference, 

not because I can't take photos properly.  Honest.

Our first thought was Astroturf; my parents had it in their back garden when I was very little, and our upstairs neighbour actually has it on his balcony now and it looks pretty cool.  We had looked into it a few years ago, but it was too expensive for what we wanted to pay back then, and despite hunting on ebay for a few weeks we couldn't find any cheap offcuts that would fit our quite large balcony (it's 4.25m by 1.15m (14' by 3'9" in old money).

At our recent trip to the garden centre we had seen samples of Astroturf, but we decided the one that we liked (i.e. the cheapest one that didn't just look like shredded green plastic bags) was still too expensive at around £25 per square metre (we'd need at least 5 square metres, and it would probably have joins  somewhere due to the long, thin shape of our balcony).

Then, a few weeks ago I saw a picture on Pinterest of Platta flooring tiles from Ikea, and fell in love.  I spoke to Kevin about it and he loved the flooring too, but when we I did some calculations on how much it would cost we I worked it out to be around £280, far too much for us to pay.

 Pic from ikea.com

The only other option that we could think of was to paint the floor dark green and hope that that would make it look at least a bit nicer than the concrete, but Kevin really wasn't keen on the idea, and after mulling it over he decided that we should spend the money and get the Platta flooring, seeing as when we move we can just take it with us and reuse it.

So we did some more calculations, and learnt a very important lesson: always do your calculations at least twice, especially if you're us me.  It turned out our my original calculations were far from correct and that we'd actually only need 5 or 6 packs at £16.99 to cover the whole balcony.  Huzzah!  So yesterday we zoomed off to Ikea and picked up 5 packets, which we laid yesterday afternoon.  It took us around an hour and half, and an hour of that was sweeping the balcony and moving the plants and potting shelves around, with another 20 minutes cutting some of the tiles to fit.  All in all, the actual laying the tiles only took around 10 minutes!  We had to go back today for an extra pack to finish off the edges, but that only took another 10 minutes of cutting tiles when we got back.

The flooring tiles look like this on top:

and like this underneath:

and just clip together like this:

Can you see where the little pegs just fit in the holes?  It's as easy as that.

Our balcony is exactly 3 1/2 tiles wide so we had to cut some tiles in half and snip some of the joining pieces off the edges for a snug fit.  It says on the instructions to use a saw to cut the tiles, but I tried a pair of secateurs to snip through the plastic and they worked perfectly, so we just did them that way.

Anyway, without further ado, here are some before and after shots of the balcony:

Can you tell we haven't been out there for a while?!

Ta-daaaaah!

Those are the outdoor cushions with the covers that I made from the same fabric I made my tote bag with (I made them about a month ago but the weather went bad so we haven't used them outside until now).

That's a little close up of our 'gardening area', all  nice and tidy and spider-free now, thanks to Kevin <3.  Our little bee house is out there, but we still have no takers.  Maybe our super sophisticated new flooring will attract some posh bees...

It's so nice out there now.  The floor makes such a huge difference, and looks way more expensive than it actually is (it cost a total of £101.94), and we can take it with us when we go!  It also needs very little maintenance, just oiling twice a year, which we do with our coffee table and chopping board anyway so it's just an extra thing to add to that list, and it should be quite enjoyable to do on a nice day outside.  It also has the added bonus that we can move it if we need to do any particularly messy jobs outside, such as sanding or spray painting.  All in all I think we've found our perfect floor (can you tell how much we love it?!).

We've been doing lots of other little bits and pieces (and a couple of big bits and pieces) of DIY, some of which should be finished very soon, so we'll have some more updates in a few days (I think I always say that and then don't update for weeks, but I really mean it this time!).  But right now I'm off to bed so I can wake up extra early and have breakfast outside, woo!