It's hard to believe we're at the halfway mark of the One Room Challenge, and while we still have a very long way to go before we finish the patio, I'm excited to enjoy the space once this is all over. This past week, we took on two projects, fixing up the house's back entrance and starting to rebuild the fence. Time management has been extra tricky with this project because, unlike the guest suite that we tackled last year, we can't work on it at night (aka once the kids are in bed and we are both free at the same time!), and we're at the mercy of the elements. Toggling back and forth between a couple of projects is helpful in this case to keep the ball rolling. Case in point: we needed to finish painting the door when the yard was shaded (after an unfortunate incident where the now black metal door started steaming as I rolled a coat of paint on in the sun, baking some streaks into place) and once we replaced the fence posts the freshly poured concrete needed time to set before we could continue to work on it.

To be honest, this project has been the most challenging to date in determining the order of operations. We settled on replacing the fence before refinishing the deck to avoid damaging the finish and building the pergola, bench, and outdoor kitchen after so we won't need to work around them. Because the deck needs 72 hours to dry after we finish it, we'll move to the side yard and work on enclosing the space underneath the stairs while we wait to be able to resume working on the patio. Yeah, it sounds complicated to me too. Hopefully, once the fence is in place, everything will start to move a little more quickly. We have a few more free days to work on it, so fingers crossed everything goes smoothly. Check back next week for another update, and if you want to see it unfold in (mostly) real-time, follow me on Instagram.

Thanks for following along; you can check out what the rest of the participants are up to over on the One Room Challenge blog