Playhouse Makeover

Target

Do your flowering shrubs need a makeover? Perhaps it’s the overgrown shrub that craves your contact whenever you use the front door or carport. Maybe it’s an old shrub that lost its vitality and produces few if any flowers in its dense thicket of crisscrossing branches. Then there’s the shrub that becomes top-heavy or “leggy”, with most of its leaves clustered at the top, revealing bare or leafless stems below. If you want to improve access to your home or your view from windows now hidden by leaves and branches, consider these three options.

QUICK, BEFORE THE FROST gets hold of the ground for good, do it: Take a soil test, to send off to the lab. Host Joe Lamp’l of the award-winning public television program “Growing a Greener World” says this simple practice is a foundational tactic of garden success, and shares other insights into building and maintaining healthy garden soil.

Here at The Spruce, it's important to us that we show you the best, easiest ways to make your home work for you. Whether you're renting a home temporarily or you own your forever home, there are so many simple, doable ways to not just make it more beautiful, but more functional as well.

Check out the longer version of this video on our YouTube channel with charts to help you choose just the right colors from 5 different brands of chalk paint. The longer video is here: Stephie McCarthy Bark Texture made with Caulk

I have this little tiny balcony that had water damage on the walls and just overall dinginess, and I was looking for low cost ways to make it a nice place to sit and read. I had no experience with tiling before and I'm really happy with the result!

I found a couple of old plastic spring rocking horses in a free junk pile. I decided to give the first one a new identity as a unicorn. The 2nd one is still deciding what to be......

This June, some of our J. Parker’s team helped to put the finishing touches to the patient garden at St David’s Hospice in Llandudno, North Wales. We donated a new gazebo, planters, compost and hundreds of bedding plants to help finish off the garden which the St David’s team have lovingly built so that the patients at the hospice can enjoy an outside space full of colourful flowers.

This June, some of our J. Parker’s team helped to put the finishing touches to the patient garden at St David’s Hospice in Llandudno, North Wales. We donated a new gazebo, planters, compost and hundreds of bedding plants to help finish off the garden which the St David’s team have lovingly built so that the patients at the hospice can enjoy an outside space full of colourful flowers.

One day I was browsing Pinterest and came across playhouse makeover ideas. After seeing the inspiration I decided I just had to do my own makeover for my daughter’s birthday gift while she is still little. So I immediately browsed second-hand sites and found the perfect plastic playhouse for £25. We got it home, I cleaned it up and painted it and I am so in love with the transformation!

Chuck and I bought our first house together in April 2014 and it has been one project after another...and yea we love it:) The deck looked OK at first, then the cheap red stain the seller had put on started coming off, a year later this is what it looked like — it was so ugly we had to do something. So Memorial Day weekend we power washed it for what seemed like hours and hours and did a full deck makeover.

We tackled a project last summer that I was loathe to do, but after years of praying to the Yard Crasher gods to no avail, we plunged into the pool patio project. Our inground pool is surrounded by a paver patio that pre-project resembled an animal pen. By that, I mean the metal fence that runs the perimeter was very, very close, allowing just enough space for two people to pass but certainly not to comfortably seat anyone. I don’t know how it is that I cannot locate a photo of the before, to illustrate how tight it was. However, here is a photo taken afterward, where the measuring tape denotes the end of the former pool patio. Tight, right?