Our One Room Challenge patio has come so far since last week! If you follow me on Instagram, then you know we’ve been super busy and that the space is actually done and we photographed it yesterday! I’ll have to wait for the reveal images until next week but for now, here’s what we’ve accomplished since the last update.

First of all, we finally cleared all of hubby’s tools out and pressure washed the cement floor. I was hoping the pressure washing would remove the stains but that wasn’t the case so we ended up having to paint the floor, which was an extra step we didn’t plan for. 

First, we sealed the floor and then painted it with concrete paint. Like I mentioned before, we have plans to eventually add a pool off of the patio so we’ll cover the patio floor in whatever pavers we install around the pool so that it’s a seamless transition. For now, I decided to keep the concrete floor clean and simple. 

Painting the floor made a huge difference and even though it was an extra step we didn’t anticipate, it was totally necessary and worth it.

In addition to painting the floors we finished painting the exterior doors and I have a blog post coming about the product we used that made that process pretty easy.

Other than painting, we spent a lot of time since last week working on landscaping.

The area on either side of the patio was a hot mess so we added some soil and shoveled two truckloads of river rock into the plant beds. That’s hard work, lemme tell ya! I am not a fan of mulch at all so although the rock was labor intensive, it was definitely worth it.

I kept the plants for the garden beds pretty simple and chose to use ornamental grass, agave, aloe and gardenia bushes.

I planted my herb garden too! I love the vintage charm this vintage Hungarian child’s tub adds to the space. It makes such a cute container for the herbs. 

And because I can’t help myself, here are a couple sneak peeks of the finished space that I shared on Instagram. 🙂 

All of the detailed info on sources, colors, etc will be in next week’s One Room Challenge patio reveal post! Stay tuned, I can’t wait to show off the entire space!

In case you missed it, here are the week 1, week 2, week 3 and week 4 updates. Also, don’t forget to see what the other participants are up to!