Little Boxes

And some not-so-little boxes!  That's right folks, window boxes and planters.  I chose to go with black full-color stain (thanks for the advice, Kjersti and Mrs. Autumn!).  I only stained the exterior of the planter and a few inches down to save myself some work.  Read: I'm lazy.

These planters are lazy too.  Just look at them laying around in the garage!

Even though we don't have the weed-block and gravel in yet, I couldn't resist hauling them outside once the stain had dried to see how they looked.  To nobody's surprise, the black blended right in with the dark earth and soil below, just like Mrs. Autumn said they would.  And four planters looked like plenty enough to disguise a multitude of sins.

Gonna shroud that AC unit in ferns, baby.

And the depth is juuuust right.  They create a narrow walkway along the fence line with a wide berth on either end of the path.  And check out how they measure up with the AC unit and the crawl access- you can hardly even see the sloped metal lid back there.

The art of disguise.

Since I stained the window boxes to match, I asked Steve if he would mind installing them for me.  Because this house has much less trim around the exterior of the windows than our last house, we had to make a little modification to keep the boxes looking more "square" instead of leaning against the house, looking as though their contents might spill out at a moment's notice.  To solve our problem, Steve ripped down some spare 2x2 and installed a little chunk on the back of both window boxes.

Holding screws in his teeth an everything.

It essentially created a bumper for the bottom of each window box where it would sit against the house.  See?

Bumper #2.

Then it was outside to hang them!  Steve secured the long J-shaped rail under the wondow.

Three cheers for power tools!

All we had to do was slide the window boxes into place.  See the bumper right next to the house?  Tricky.  This is the look husbands give wives when the wives say "Hold it there for just a minute so I can take a picture of you!"

Half smirk, half exasperation.

Check it out now!  I am so excited with how this turned out and can't wait to get the gravel down and start filling these babies with shade-loving plants!!

Ready to roll!