{Sidenote: I realize I never shared why we have so much wood for our projects. When we first decided we wanted to build an outdoor table based on Ana White’s plans because of the hefty prices of outdoor furniture, we quickly realized that lumber isn’t as readily available here as it is in the US. Nor is it cheap if you buy it on a per-proyect basis. So we finally found a place that sold lumber in bulk, and bought a ton of wood for 400€. It was quite a bit of money up front, but so far we’ve built the outdoor table, two benches, two barstools, a kitchen countertop, another table countertop, two big planters for the drying area, and the outdoor kitchen, and we still have more than half leftover! So we’ve definitely streched the 400€, and I think we’ll be running out of things to build before we run out of wood… I’ll stop ranting now}

Anyway. After bouncing ideas around we decided the following:

• It had to be simple. A kitchen sink and some portable appliances, like a plug in grill and induction stovetop, plus a countertop to prep the food, was enough for us. We thought about buying an induction stovetop for indoors and moving outdoors the stovetop we have now (it came with the apartment and I don’t like it…), but given the rainy weather we ultimately decided that portable was the way to go for us.
• We wanted something modular, that we could move around if/when we wanted to; for example, if it was about to rain, move it to the part of the patio that’s covered. The only thing that won’t be going anywhere is the kitchen sink, obviously, because of the pipes. But I can live with that.
• The problem with everything being modular is that we had to find a way to be able to level the legs since the patio is slanted for water drainage.
• Also, the sink had to be BIG. I’m tired of not being able to fit baking sheets in the sink; they’re a pain to wash. Plus it’ll be useful as a utility sink as well for all the painting/building projects we do outside. After looking around we settled on this one from Ikea, which, apparently, is not available in the US. (I liked this one a lot better, but at 3 times the price, it wasn’t gonna happen).

So, finally, we decided to build three “modules”, forming an L-shape: one for the sink and two for cooking/prep. The last two would have two traditional legs and two legs on caster wheels. All of the legs/caster wheels had to have a system that allowed them to be leveled (this wasn’t easy, but we did it!). When it came to the actual design, I liked these freestanding kitchen cabinets from Ikea:

We ended up doing something similar, but with stainless steel countertops. We’ve already built two of them (the third one is on hold because we’ve run out of screws) and, even though they’re not finished yet since the doors are still missing and they’re not stained yet I thought I’d share a few pics…

What do you think? We’re planning on finishing them with an ebony stain for the cabinet itself and light gray stain for the wood frame around the stainless countertops. Kind of like this, which I found on Pinterest:

I’ll be back in a couple of days to tell you how we built everything, since it’s something we designed ourselves. Oh and we’re planning to cook a paella there in two weeks! Nothing like setting a deadline to hurry up and finish everything already.

P.S. We’re mostly finished with the drying rack area but we’ve had problems with the neighbors about it… so I’m going to wait a bit before sharing it. I can’t wait to post pictures though, because I think it looks great!

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!

The weekend went very well… but the operation “finish setting up the webpage”, not so much. I don’t stop working on it until it’s perfect, so it takes me a long time to make it look exactly like I want it to. So it’ll have to wait a couple of weeks until I sort everything out. Anyway, like I said, the weekend was very nice – I was able to enjoy Bilbao’s Aste Nagusia with my friends and we even celebrated a birthday on Saturday. Two of my cousins came to visit from Madrid and I think they had a good time; partying here is quite different from Madrid… We’re getting together today as well (they’re staying at my parents’ house with my brother) at my place to have dinner and play some poker, so it should be fun!

Today’s post is possible thanks to the amazing Ana White of Knock Off Wood. As I already mentioned, my apartment is smallish but it has a huge outdoor space. Since our living room/dining room is limited in size we can’t accommodate a lot of people inside for dinner, so we decided to buy a very big table for outdoor use. We wanted something made of solid wood, kind of rustic feeling. But everything we saw was so expensive. We’re talking more than 1000$ expensive. And that was just for the table… if you added in the chairs, it became closer to 2000$! I wasn’t about to spend that much on an outdoor seating area, so I thought that maybe I could find something online that would help me build it. We had already bought MDF boards to make our closet fittings so I knew I could find solid boards. That’s when I found Knock Off Wood (right now Ana migrated her blog to a new domain, Ana White). I was hooked instantly! She designs easy to follow plans to build your own furniture – some designs are original, some are similar to well known furniture retailers’ pieces in the US – but all are equally amazing. And best of all: it’s free! I’ve always said that the generosity of bloggers amazes me; people work on recipes, diy projects, and other stuff and they offer all this advice to world without expecting anything in return. I think that’s pretty amazing!

After finding Ana’s website the hardest part was deciding which table we wanted to do. The farmhouse table had the rustic feel we were going for, so that’s what we did. The hardest part was converting the measurements to metric, and accommodating the dimensional lumber to the lumber they sell here. Also, finding a seller that didn’t charge 4x as much for wood as it sells for in the US was pretty difficult, too. Other than that, the cutting and building came together very nicely, as you can see in this picture. We built it between my boyfriend and myself, he was a bit skeptic at first, but ended up agreeing that Ana’s plans were very detailed and easy to follow. We’ve been so busy during the summer that we haven’t been able to finish sanding and applying varnish to it, but I think it looks really good.

I hope you liked this project – next up are the rustic benches to go with our table! I also hope you all go visit Ana’s site and start building something, too. I’m off for today, those benches aren’t going to build themselves!