Oh Christmas tree, oh Christmas tree... For nearly three months,
you've been living on our balcony. No matter the weather, you seemed to
enjoy that small space just for yourself.
Well suck it, the balcony's mine now. Have fun in the trash can.
Unfortunately,
getting rid of an old Christmas tree doesn't necessarily make a balcony
much prettier. Not if said balcony basically consists of poorly spread
concrete and a rail that looks like a rusty old can with holes in it.
But don't despair, with a bit of imagination, anything's possible.
First
of all, the rest of the "things I might want to use again but actually I
don't so I just let them R.I.P on my balcony" your man might have left
on the balcony before you moved in need to go. That might be lots of
bottles that bring you some money. It might be an old cat toilet. It
might be buckets of paint you *could* have used to paint things for your
balcony - if they hadn't been sitting there for over a year.
Once
all that stuff is gone, the real adventure begins. Two square meters
for two people isn't exactly much space. And you want ALL THE THINGS. I
know you do. A table would be great for all the things like eating,
reading, painting, writing or slicing cucumbers. Whatever floats your
boat. Then, of course, chairs might be nice, because you definitely
don't want to be standing while you slice said cucumbers. But a naked
balcony with nothing but a table and two chairs, that wouldn't look
pretty and you wouldn't want to use it. So you want flowers, candles,
water, a parasol and maybe a cage for your pet crocodile. Again,
whatever *you* want and need.
Now, one day I might actually build a crocodile cage, just for the giggles. But for now, I have a few different ideas.
A
table! What do we need the table to be? Small. Basically, it shouldn't
even be there, unless you really need it. Especially not the table legs,
there's not much room to put *your* legs anyways. We can't really make
the table float all on its own and if you want it to at least hold a cup
of coffee, there should be some kind of table leg to support it. What
seems like a nearly impossible task is actually pretty easy when you
think about it.
What do we need for it? Wood, lots of wood. You
can use a small flock as a table leg and a simple board as the table
top. Of course, you can also use your creativity here. We bought a
wooden floor tile, 50x50cm from the hardware store, simply because it
was cheaper than building it ourselves. With a piano hinge and a small
wooden board we attached the table top to the rail. On the ground, we
used another small piece of wood on one side of the railing, a hinge and
the flock for our table leg. Then comes the tricky part, especially if
you have nothing to measure the length of the table leg. You need to cut
the flock to the exact length you need for the flock to get stuck under
the table (You can also secure it with a screw or the like) and the
table to be exactly even. You wouldn't want your coffee to run right out
of the mug, would you?
Of course, I have some pictures so you can actually see what I mean!
Flowers!
Putting up flower pots all over your balcony takes up a lot of space
that you need for your table and chair. But there's a solution! Simply
hang your flower pots from the rail, the walls, the balcony above yours
(you might want to ask your neighbour here). Now, if your balcony is
only two square meters "big", I assume you don't want to spend all your
money on pretty flower pots. Again, there's a solution! You can buy the
cheap pots and make them prettier. Buy a white plastic pot and paint it!
If you're talented with painting, you can use a brush, some paint rests
(or new paint, if you want to buy it) and let your creative juices
flow. Not too much though, the neighbours might be watching. Or you make
yourself a stencil and use spray paint. You can either leave the white
plastic as a base colour or you use two colours. For our pots, we used
green and gold, as seen here:
There
are currently no flowers in there, as the two pots that look like this
are the new homes for some kitchen herbs! That way you can have green
stuff on your balcony, use it for tasty food AND avoid all the bees that
flowers normally attract.
Of course, you can use
smaller pots as well! There are round pots with hooks as well, in our
case those are metal pots. They're not very pretty, but not exactly ugly
either, so I just decorated them with some beads for a little bit of
GET PRETTIER.
Granted,
once you've put flowers in those pots, the beads will most likely
disappear behind them, depending on the size of the plant. But you can
still see it through and it's a nice little detail. Of course, you can
also put up a small vase with some freshly cut flowers - that way it's
not a constant part of your balcony furniture, but you can put it there
whenever you have flowers - and if you need the space, you can just put
them inside. They're pretty no matter where they stand. Now, to the next
step!
Candles! Of course, you most likely want some
decoration, too. Candles on a balcony are a bit tricky. Wind can easily
blow them out, so you need to get a little creative here. I simply used
old marmalade glasses so the candles are save! A marmalade glass with a
candle inside all on its own looks a bit weird though. So I used white
stones to fill the glasses up a bit before placing the candle on them.
For the outside decoration of the glasses, I used the same beads as
above, because I bought them in a huge package. I tied them to the glass
with some wire and used a pincer to twirl them so they won't open
again. The results are shown below!
But
of course, a day only has so many hours and since our neighbours would
give us hell for working on our balcony on Easter, we enjoyed our
breakfast on our almost-pretty balcony today. Stay tuned for Part II,
including a white fence to avoid the curious stalkers next door, a way
to cover the ugly concrete, light sources, more outside-suitable
decoration and whatever else comes to my mind while we're working on
finishing our project!
