-Here’s a backyard story we’d like to share from Olympia, WA
If you’re reading this, you’re probably exploring your options for an outdoor living area. After realizing we never spent time in our backyard, we wanted to build something that would make us want to spend time outside the house more often in the spring/summer/fall when the weather was nice. We started with an estimate from a general contractor to make our patio larger, build an outdoor living space that extended from the covered porch where we could put outdoor furniture, a TV, lighting, and cooking space for a bbq, griddle, smoker, and prep table. The estimate: $40-50K! And that of course wouldn’t include any of the furniture/tv/etc… This was a shock but obviously we had no idea what our expectations should have been for such an addition. Since that was out of our desirable budget for the project, we decided to come up with an alternative where we could at least meet some of our wants.
Enter the Yardistry 12×16 Gazebo from Costco! We ended up having the contractor extend our patio, then we built the Gazebo, then had the contractor come back out and build a wall that extended from the back of the house, along one side of the Gazebo that would partially enclose the space and allow for a TV to be hung. We then added furniture, outdoor rugs, LED string lighting, a ceiling fan, sound bar with subwoofer and surround sound speakers, Bevy bar tables, a roll-down sun shade, curtains, and even a small swing for our infant children to enjoy when we’re outside. We also added 2 tables behind the furniture with chairs to have a place for dining outside. For electrical, we were only powering a small fan, tv, surround sound, and LED lighting, so we just neatly ran a higher amperage extension cord from the outlet around the base of the walls and up one of the gazebo posts to smart outlets connected to Google home for voice control. TOTAL COST for EVERYTHING: $15K! (about 1/4 of what we would of paid to custom build the same space on the back of the house)
For the Gazebo, I highly recommend to sort out all of the pieces and place the hardware in numbered ziploc bags that correlate to what page of the instruction the hardware will be installed at. That way, you’ll know exactly what you need when you’re on that page (it’s all in the bag). As long as you’re willing to put in some time and sweat, you can really build yourself that outdoor living space at a fraction of the cost of an entirely custom job. We now spend almost every evening outside in our backyard from April through September and we couldn’t be happier with how it came out. Yardistry gets an A+ for such a high quality product that goes together exactly as expected.
