It's been a while since last I posted. In all honesty, the beach house is pretty much finished, I just haven't kept up with this blog. There has been exciting progress, so let's catch up!
With the house roof installed, it was time to concentrate on the beautiful garden space. I opted to use fake stone as real stone would be just too heavy and found a nice embossed printed stone on etsy from Greece! I purchased two patterns, one for the stone wall and one for the flagstone floor.
I started with the stone wall first to frame the space. Because the pattern repeated too frequently, I cut and flipped the panels around and tried to make sure the same stones weren't too close to each other. I planned to use wooden beams, balsa wood strips colored with marker, also to help break up the pattern.
Then I shifted my attention to the floor. With the flagstones paper, I had to lay one piece over the other to cover the whole area, and so I cut along the stones' edges and glued them down.
To precisely cut around the pool, luckily I had kept the cut-out piece of foam board from where the pool sits in the base! This worked beautifully.
The grass was cut from a large rolled up tube of moss mat that I think was meant for train layouts. It worked great here and didn't lose too many mossy bits when handled.
Now I wanted to naturalize the pond. I love this pond, I found it at the Victoria Park Gallery in Kincardine, Ontario, by artist Wilma Michel and knew it had to become a pond (I believe it was sold as a snack plate). I found at the Dollarstore some green sand and some lovely loose tea (thanks Mom) and glued it onto the pond's edge.
It worked very well!!
Looking good!
The stone wall looked really nice with the wood strips but I liked the needle felted scenery in behind too so I decided to shorten the back wall on the short side of the garden.
The stone paper was glued to the foam board and the wooden uprights glued on top of that.
Then the top rails were colored, cut and glued to the top of the foam board.
As I went along, I tested the fit a few times to make sure everything was okay. It looked better and better each time!
As a finishing touch to the wall, I added three rose trellises. This came in a sheet and could be cut to size, which was lovely.
And here is what it looked like! A sweet spot, sheltered from the wind and providing some shade!
Next: the furniture arrives!