{"id":6724,"date":"2014-05-08T22:32:51","date_gmt":"2014-05-09T05:32:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.emilymorganti.com\/blog\/?p=6724"},"modified":"2014-05-08T22:34:07","modified_gmt":"2014-05-09T05:34:07","slug":"rosedale-landscaping-finishing-the-patio","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.emilymorganti.com\/blog\/?p=6724","title":{"rendered":"Rosedale landscaping – finishing the patio"},"content":{"rendered":"

The final stage of landscaping the Rosedale involved finishing the patio and adding a fence. The patio is made from “slate” (actually, plaster) flagstones. They’re textured with very slight color variation that seemed too dull to me, so I decided to spruce them up using the same technique I’ve used in the past with egg carton stone<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Using a “dry” brush with most of the paint dabbed on, I first added two shades of gray to the stones. You can hardly tell.<\/p>\n

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Next came brown, which is more obvious.<\/p>\n

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I kept at it with various shades, including the tan and purple of the house and shutters. I didn’t have any particular plan for how I wanted these to look, just wanted to give them some character while also making them “go” with the house.<\/p>\n

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Everything was going well until I got the great<\/s> terrible idea to add black. Abort the mission!<\/p>\n

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I covered the black with a few more rounds of gray. It’s the sort of mistake that’s easily fixed.<\/p>\n

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I also painted the columns I’d bought, which started out off-white. In the photo below the one on the left has just one base coat of gray, while the one on the right has had some other shades dry brushed onto it. I didn’t go as nuts with the different colors on these as I did with the flagstones, just a few coats of gray and one of brown.<\/p>\n

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Here’s how they look together. Not a bad match considering they started out completely different colors<\/a>!<\/p>\n

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With egg carton stone, the next step after painting would have been to add a coat of matte varnish. But when I started to do that to the flagstones, these black splotches appeared that totally freaked me out.<\/p>\n

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When I was gluing down the flagstones I got a few of them wet and the same thing happened, so I figured this was just due to the varnish being wet and that the splotches would go away when they dried. But I decided to quit while I was ahead, just in case coating the varnish ruined what I’d already done. <\/p>\n

I did go ahead and varnish the columns, though. And once those front few flagstones dried they looked normal again.<\/p>\n

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Next came the fence. I bought Grandt line Gothic railing<\/a> at the dollhouse store. It came with two ~9″ pieces for around $11, which was pricey enough that I didn’t want to go back and buy a second pair, so I was determined to use as much of the lengths I had as possible.<\/p>\n

On the right side, the distance from the column to the edge of the base would use up almost a whole piece.<\/p>\n

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This left me with a small piece I couldn’t really do anything with.<\/p>\n

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On the other side, the distance from the column to the edge of the base was smaller, so I had more left over. I failed to document this with photos, but I had enough fencing left from the second piece that I could remove some to create two short pieces to turn in on the patio.<\/p>\n

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Since the flagstones add height, I sanded down the bottom of the post so these fence pieces sit flat on the patio. This had the added bonus of providing stability to the piece I cobbled together.<\/p>\n

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With all my pieces cut to the right sizes and the cobbled-together piece glued with Quick Grip, I painted them with matte black paint, then a coat of matte sealer. The end result looks reasonably like wrought iron.<\/p>\n

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While the fence pieces dried, I added grass around the edge of the patio. First, tacky glue along the edge of the stones.<\/p>\n

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I pushed grass right up against this so it looks like grass is growing beside the flagstones, rather than the flagstones sitting flat on top of it.<\/p>\n

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On the front, I masked the base’s trim first so I wouldn’t accidentally glue grass to it.<\/p>\n

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I sprinkled grass on top of the flagstones and worked it into the cracks with my finger.<\/p>\n

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Here’s the end result.<\/p>\n

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Back to the fence. Since the fence posts were too tall and I doubted that gluing the fence in place would be sturdy enough, I decided to drill holes to insert the fence posts into.<\/p>\n

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I put the fence pieces in place and marked where the holes should be with a Sharpie.<\/p>\n

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On both sides I messed up the drilling — one hole was a smidge too far away from the column and the other a smidge too close. Then I tried to drill a second hole right next to the first and the bit kept slipping back into the original hole. Oops.<\/p>\n

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They both worked out okay, though. Since the bit kept slipping into the first holes instead of going all the way through, my second holes were too shallow, but I dealt with this by shaving off the bottom of the fence post. <\/p>\n

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I glued the fence post into the hole and then glopped glue around the surface of it.<\/p>\n

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And I applied grass around the bottom of the post. You’d never know there’s a sloppy, too-big hole there!<\/p>\n

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Here’s the finished fence. I used Quick Grip to glue the delicate front pieces to the columns. It’s a little flimsy but it’ll be okay as long as no kids go grabbing at it. (Which will hopefully never happen!)<\/p>\n

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My last task was to paint this pair of benches I bought. They’re gray, but I felt like they were too light compared to the rest of the patio. (The pic below was taken before I added grass around the patio…)<\/p>\n

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I spattered on different colors with my dry brush until I was satisfied, then painted with matte varnish.<\/p>\n

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And voila! I might add a plant or something in the corner where the benches meet, but otherwise the patio’s done for now. Next time I’ll post pictures of the finished landscaping.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The final stage of landscaping the Rosedale involved finishing the patio and adding a fence. The patio is made from “slate” (actually, plaster) flagstones. They’re textured with very slight color variation that seemed too dull to me, so I decided to spruce them up using the same technique I’ve used in the past with egg […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[29,19,42],"class_list":["post-6724","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-dollhouses","tag-greenleaf-rosedale","tag-half-scale","tag-landscaping","post-preview"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.emilymorganti.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6724","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.emilymorganti.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.emilymorganti.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.emilymorganti.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.emilymorganti.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6724"}],"version-history":[{"count":25,"href":"https:\/\/www.emilymorganti.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6724\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6823,"href":"https:\/\/www.emilymorganti.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6724\/revisions\/6823"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.emilymorganti.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6724"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.emilymorganti.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6724"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.emilymorganti.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6724"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}