Well suck it, the balcony's mine now. Have fun in the trash can.
Unfortunately, getting rid of an old Christmas tree doesn't necessarily make a balcony much prettier. Not if said balcony basically consists of poorly spread concrete and a rail that looks like a rusty old can with holes in it.
But don't despair, with a bit of imagination, anything's possible.
First of all, the rest of the "things I might want to use again but actually I don't so I just let them R.I.P on my balcony" your man might have left on the balcony before you moved in need to go. That might be lots of bottles that bring you some money. It might be an old cat toilet. It might be buckets of paint you *could* have used to paint things for your balcony - if they hadn't been sitting there for over a year.
Once all that stuff is gone, the real adventure begins. Two square meters for two people isn't exactly much space. And you want ALL THE THINGS. I know you do. A table would be great for all the things like eating, reading, painting, writing or slicing cucumbers. Whatever floats your boat. Then, of course, chairs might be nice, because you definitely don't want to be standing while you slice said cucumbers. But a naked balcony with nothing but a table and two chairs, that wouldn't look pretty and you wouldn't want to use it. So you want flowers, candles, water, a parasol and maybe a cage for your pet crocodile. Again, whatever *you* want and need.
Now, one day I might actually build a crocodile cage, just for the giggles. But for now, I have a few different ideas.
A table! What do we need the table to be? Small. Basically, it shouldn't even be there, unless you really need it. Especially not the table legs, there's not much room to put *your* legs anyways. We can't really make the table float all on its own and if you want it to at least hold a cup of coffee, there should be some kind of table leg to support it. What seems like a nearly impossible task is actually pretty easy when you think about it.
What do we need for it? Wood, lots of wood. You can use a small flock as a table leg and a simple board as the table top. Of course, you can also use your creativity here. We bought a wooden floor tile, 50x50cm from the hardware store, simply because it was cheaper than building it ourselves. With a piano hinge and a small wooden board we attached the table top to the rail. On the ground, we used another small piece of wood on one side of the railing, a hinge and the flock for our table leg. Then comes the tricky part, especially if you have nothing to measure the length of the table leg. You need to cut the flock to the exact length you need for the flock to get stuck under the table (You can also secure it with a screw or the like) and the table to be exactly even. You wouldn't want your coffee to run right out of the mug, would you?
Of course, I have some pictures so you can actually see what I mean!
Flowers! Putting up flower pots all over your balcony takes up a lot of space that you need for your table and chair. But there's a solution! Simply hang your flower pots from the rail, the walls, the balcony above yours (you might want to ask your neighbour here). Now, if your balcony is only two square meters "big", I assume you don't want to spend all your money on pretty flower pots. Again, there's a solution! You can buy the cheap pots and make them prettier. Buy a white plastic pot and paint it! If you're talented with painting, you can use a brush, some paint rests (or new paint, if you want to buy it) and let your creative juices flow. Not too much though, the neighbours might be watching. Or you make yourself a stencil and use spray paint. You can either leave the white plastic as a base colour or you use two colours. For our pots, we used green and gold, as seen here:
There are currently no flowers in there, as the two pots that look like this are the new homes for some kitchen herbs! That way you can have green stuff on your balcony, use it for tasty food AND avoid all the bees that flowers normally attract.
Of course, you can use smaller pots as well! There are round pots with hooks as well, in our case those are metal pots. They're not very pretty, but not exactly ugly either, so I just decorated them with some beads for a little bit of GET PRETTIER.
Granted, once you've put flowers in those pots, the beads will most likely disappear behind them, depending on the size of the plant. But you can still see it through and it's a nice little detail. Of course, you can also put up a small vase with some freshly cut flowers - that way it's not a constant part of your balcony furniture, but you can put it there whenever you have flowers - and if you need the space, you can just put them inside. They're pretty no matter where they stand. Now, to the next step!
Candles! Of course, you most likely want some decoration, too. Candles on a balcony are a bit tricky. Wind can easily blow them out, so you need to get a little creative here. I simply used old marmalade glasses so the candles are save! A marmalade glass with a candle inside all on its own looks a bit weird though. So I used white stones to fill the glasses up a bit before placing the candle on them. For the outside decoration of the glasses, I used the same beads as above, because I bought them in a huge package. I tied them to the glass with some wire and used a pincer to twirl them so they won't open again. The results are shown below!
But
of course, a day only has so many hours and since our neighbours would
give us hell for working on our balcony on Easter, we enjoyed our
breakfast on our almost-pretty balcony today. Stay tuned for Part II,
including a white fence to avoid the curious stalkers next door, a way
to cover the ugly concrete, light sources, more outside-suitable
decoration and whatever else comes to my mind while we're working on
finishing our project!
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