I’m finally on vacation!  After one terrible exam and two okay ones, I’m done for now and looking forward to two weeks off. Well, not totally off, but almost. It’ll be two weeks of building, painting, doing things around the home, enjoying the good weather and hopefully blogging a lot more than lately. I’ll mostly be painting (and sanding!), since we’ve already built 2 planters, 2 long benches, 2 kitchen stools and we still have to paint the farmhouse table.

Since we had a party yesterday in our terrace, I thought I’d show you some pictures. (You might want to check out the floor plan to understand the flow better).

Here’s the view when you come out the living room/dining room, with the table and benches we built:

To the left there’s a sitting area that we created with pallets and Ikea outdoor cushions. Basically we added a bit of height to the pallets, treated them so the wood won’t split outdoors and painted them. Then we bought some inexpensive Ikea cushions and voilà! An outdoor seating area for 10 or more.

A friend brought a screen projector to watch the Madrid-Barcelona soccer game – a “classic” as they call it, but since we’re having 3 of them during the next two weeks I hope the novelty wears off. (It was actually a pretty boring match, but having the projector was awesome! I hope someday we can buy one to watch movies outdoors during the summer). The deck chair you see is there to hold the projector, but we still hadn’t set it up.

To the right of the dining room/living room you see the access off the kitchen with the washing machine:

The other side of the terrace is still empty (so hard to fill such a big outdoor space!) except for the corner – that’s where we’ll be doing the drying rack area and storing some tools.

We want to install a tent/canopy, but because of the big size and because it also has to be the same as our neighbors’, it’s pretty expensive so we’re saving up for it. Maybe next summer. So for now, when we have some sort of gathering during the summer we set these tents up for the day and the neighbors don’t mind. It’s mostly because otherwise it gets freezing cold during the night, and these help retain the heat a bit.

And here’s the setup at night, just before people arrived (the food was still in the kitchen):

And if you’re anything like me, you’ll want to know what we had for dinner. Some of the guests brought tortillas, sandwiches, empanadas, chorizo (deli meats) and chips and such. We also made barbeque chicken wings, quiches, blondies and cookies -n-cream ice cream for dessert. Everything was delicious! And yes, I realize I’m terrible because I don’t have any pictures of the food nor any of the recipes for the things we made, but I’ll be blogging about them sometime soon and sharing each and every one of the recipes. I promise! So, we had a great time and since the party was outdoors we didn’t have a lot of trouble cleaning everything up today. I can’t wait to do more stuff like this now that the weather’s getting warmer!

What do you think? Share your opinion in the comments.