Meet our pretty new pergola

This is the story about building a backyard pergola but there’s always so much more to the story than that.

When we moved into the house last August, we inherited a back patio that’s totally functional but lacking any sort of purpose. We’d use it as a place to build things, like our daughters’ playhouse which we built at the far side. But the rest of the surface had no structure. And just like a room that’s too big and breezy in a home, it’s helpful to carve out rooms within a room to create a more comfortable, inviting setting.

I say all of this, but I also can promise you that tackling the exterior of our home was supposed to be on next year’s list. Andrew, however, had a vision, and he’s more hard-headed of the two of us (he would agree!). This pergola was his priority, and so it became ours. The next thing I knew, it showed up at our house and one Saturday morning while the girls watched cartoons, we got to building.

Thank God it was a kit this time and it was remarkably easy to put together with super clear instructions. And then I didn’t need to work out all weekend because I spent the next few days lifting and readjusting the posts. I thought we were done with this project after the second day, but then he reminded me he wanted to create a focal point for our wall of camellias and the water feature we need to fix eventually. 

And so then he showed me his little sketch, which included a trellis wall and an arch, because if you’ve been here any amount of time, he/we love an arch. Next thing you know, he’s attaching the trellis wall and adding trim to cover up a screws and bending wood for a seamless-ish arch. It was a bit of a nightmare getting everything aligned, but he finally landed on a process he liked and a finished arch that looks pretty clean. He plans to add wood filler and sand it a bit more, but then my hope is we can step away and enjoy the fruits of his labor a bit.

ALSO! One of my sweet followers gifted us these concrete planters she wasn’t using (thank you, Whitney!), and we planted white clematis (low maintenance, fast-growing, and given all of our other colorful flowers, it felt right, palette-wise). We added a few basil plants around the base for shade, and now we wait to see how she grows!