Overall, I love apartment life – everything is convenient and easy but living during covid means that I’ve been reminded of a few things I don’t love about apartments. Most notably, the fact that we don’t have personal space to grill and garden. That said, we’re very lucky to have a pretty spacious balcony (for an apartment!) and so I like to decorate and enjoy that space and when possible, plant some herbs. (Future blog post to come on how to make a “tiny balcony oasis” on a budget.)
Quick project summary: I’ve done painted terra cotta pots a couple of times. The first time I did them personally (the larger ones above) for planting some herbs on the balcony. The second time we actually used them as part of our wedding welcome bags – we did smaller pots and because all the flowers for our wedding were from a local grower, we also included a little pack of seeds with them.
For the pots above, I used acrylic paint. I personally really like the Martha Stewart paints that are good for indoor/outdoor and are multi-surface. To get the geometric vibe, I used painters tape and created a pattern and painted in all the surface area not covered by tape. I then let the pot dry and removed the tape. From there, I used a small circular sponge brush to make the polka dots.
For the pots for our wedding, I painted the pots entirely red and then did a light gold sponge paint on them.
Things I loved about this project: I enjoyed jazzing up what is normally a pretty plain item and they definitely added to the cozy balcony vibes at our apartment, too.
What I would do differently: I kept the pots for our balcony for two years and I never took them inside (oops!). The winter wasn’t so good to them and the second year they became a bit faded. I’m pretty sure bringing them indoors or adding some type of varnish or gloss paint on top may have solved this problem.
Things I also enjoyed while doing this project:
-Redecorating our balcony so it was super zen
-Listening to 90s hip hop music
100 Little Projects 