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Top Three Tips For Choosing The Right Patio Furniture For Your Home

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Making your patio more inviting is a great way to add character to your home, especially during the spring and summer months. The pieces you choose choose match your personal style and can even coordinate with the way you’ve decorated the interior of your house. Patio furniture should be functional as well as aesthetically pleasing. Here are a few tips that will help you get started.

Jot Down Ideas

Write down some details about what you’d like the patio to look like after you’ve added furniture. Consider the function of the patio. Do you want a cozy place to read on warm evenings? Will you be hosting barbecues? Are there particular colors you want to include in the patio furniture? This will help you decide what type of furniture to adorn your patio with. For instance, a combination of neutral shades in patio sofas and chairs can easily be more eye-catching with interchangeable patterned throw pillows. Or, you can choose pieces with a tropical print to make the patio look like a vacation getaway. If you like being outside during all times of the year, be sure to leave room for an outdoor heater or fire pit on the patio to keep you warm during the fall or winter months. It’s also helpful to measure your patio to get an accurate idea of how large or small the furniture needs to be in order to fit in the space comfortably. You should be able to walk behind the furniture without bumping into other furniture pieces or the door that leads to your patio.

Test Out Furniture

After you’ve got your ideas for your patio setup in writing, it’s time to go shopping for pieces that will go well in the space. Test out patio furniture in the store to make sure it will be comfortable to sit on for long periods of time. Be sure to ask the sales associate about the quality of the furniture, and do some quick research on the company that manufacturers the furniture to see if you can pull up any positive reviews before you make your final purchases. Choose patio furniture that is pleasing to the eye, but is made of material that is easy to clean and maintain.

Decide on Storage

Once you decide which patio furniture pieces you’re taking home, come up with a plan to store the furniture properly. If you have a spacious place to keep your furniture when it’s not in use, your pieces will look like near for much longer. Your garage or the attic usually make great places to store your patio furniture. It’s also wise to search for outdoor furniture pieces that can provide storage for you. For instance, a wicker ottoman with a lid is the perfect place to store items like a tablecloth and napkin holders for an outdoor party. You can also store oversized sitting pillows or small outdoor lamps underneath a wooden bench you’ve chosen for the patio area.

Select a Weatherproof Rug

After all your patio furniture chairs, love seats and tables have been selected, don’t forget to purchase an all-wether rug that will keep all the furniture in place. The rug will also give the patio area a more welcoming feel and truly makes the space look like part of your home.

Alissa Young works as a writer and a part time blogger. Her subjects are mainly about home and home improvement and in this article, she is giving us tips on how to rearrange your patio.






Durable outdoor teak furniture to spruce up your patio

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Sometimes during the cool winter months when I can’t garden I spend time planning for the following growing season. I think about what plants might do better if I were to move them to another spot in the garden, or what plants I might purchase via mail order to plant in the spring. Do you make plans for your garden or backyard in the off season too?

When I’m not making plans for the growing season I sometimes try to think of other things that I can do or purchase for my backyard to make it all the more enjoyable. I mean, you can only work in the garden for so long right? You’ve got to sit back and relax and take in all that beauty at some point!

During the summer we often have friends drop by several times each week and we spend our time sitting in the backyard enjoying the view while we talk. Other times I have backyard BBQ’s and dinner parties.

We have a nice high glass patio table right now. I like it, but since we often have several people over for get togethers I find that the patio table is too small to accommodate our guests. The table is meant to sit four people, but we purchased two high stools so we can sit six. It’s a tight fit at times!

I’m seriously thinking about getting a larger patio table and perhaps some other patio furniture. I took a look at the outdoor patio furniture at BeFurnished.com and I really like their selection of teak outdoor furniture.

Teak is a fantastic wood to use for outdoor furniture because it’s so durable. It holds up well outdoors and I believe that the wood is resistant to pests like termites so it doesn’t get damaged the way other wood furniture does.

Another reason that I’ve thought of replacing my patio furniture with teak is because it’s so windy here in Toronto. We have a lot of wind here and we also have some major thunder storms. I always worry that the wind will blow our glass patio table over. Of course if that were to happen the glass insert would likely break and it would be quite expensive to replace. A teak table would be much less likely to be blown over in the wind.

BeFurnished.com is a US based company but they will ship anywhere in the world. That’s another reason why I like this company. Not only that, they offer free shipping within the continental US. Since I’m in Canada I always check an online stores shipping policies before I start browsing and adding items to my shopping cart. I’m always pleased when a company with products I like ships to Canada.

If you’ve been thinking about getting new patio furniture be sure to take a look at the selection at BeFurnished.com. They have teak sets, teak tables, teak chairs and benches, Adirondack Chairs, loungers and steamers, teak bars, cushions and accessories such as patio umbrellas. They also have a selection of outdoor furniture that they call “Deep Seating”. This is a selection of outdoor chairs, sofas, benches and even an ottoman that has extra deep seating for added comfort. There’s garden accessories too. Storage boxes, lazy susans and mini teak planters just to name a few.

I really like their selection of teak patio tables. They have teak extension table sets, round tables, benches sets and deep seating sets that look like outdoor living room furniture. I love it.

We have a fairly small patio so I can’t get really large patio furniture, but I do like the idea of getting an extension table. We keep it at it’s smaller non extended size most of the time, but we could make it larger to accommodate more guests when needed. I love that idea.

As most of my readers know my backyard is fairly small. It’s long and narrow and I have raised garden beds running along all of the sides of the yard, with one oval bed extending into the yard to divide the patio area, which is near the house, from the rest of the garden. The back half of the garden has a grass covered area where we sometimes pull out folding chairs when we have an outdoor gathering.

deepseating.jpg Looking at the deep seating loveseats and sofas at BeFurnished.com I thought how nice it might be to perhaps have a deep seating set for that area. I’ll have to get my husband to have a look at the outdoor furniture and see what he thinks.

I’m sure he’ll like it.

Visit BeFurnished.com to see their selection for yourself. I’d love to know if you like their teak outdoor patio furniture as much as I do.

Still recovering from my trip and starting to winterize the garden

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I’ve had a heck of week or three between being sick before I went to Vegas and getting even sicker while I was there. I’m still not up to par but I’m doing a lot better today than I have in more than a week. I think …

We got home early Monday morning and my husband had been wise enough to have both Monday and Tuesday off work. He tried going out in the garden on Monday afternoon to disassemble the patio furniture and start putting it away but it was cold, gloomy and rained quite a bit that day so he didn’t get very far.

Tuesday was a different story. It was very nice outside and while I was lying on the couch still feeling ill he decided to go outside and finish what he’d started the day before. He also managed to mound some soil around the base of ALL of our many roses in order to give the roots, graft and the first foot or so of above ground growth a bit of winter protection.

Hopefully over the weekend we’ll both get out into the garden.

I’d like to trim some of the roses that have very long branches that I know will die over winter. If I trim them a bit I can more easily protect what’s left with a large pile of leaves and some burlap wrapped around the roses. Then when spring comes all I’ve got to do is take the burlap off and digg out the leaves and if it’s anything like previous years there will be very little winter damage to the rose branches and if I’m really lucky the stems might even still be green.

Most of our roses are fairly hardy, but I have a feeling this is going to be a brutal winter so I want to be sure to protect the plants. We lost a few roses last year because we didn’t do any winter protection. It was a mild winter but we had very little snow so the cold, ice and frost damage might have been even worse than if we had had a good snow cover.

Have you begun to winterize your garden yet? Or do you even think about protecting your plants at all?

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