This Dull Backyard Becomes a Cozy, Colorful “Botanical Oasis” in 2 Weeks
Some of the best outdoor spaces are continuations of indoor spaces; they embody indoor-outdoor living. For Sonja Beaz (@limeandrender) and her family, “our outdoor living spaces provide basically an extra dining room and two extra living rooms for us,” she says, and they were born out of a need for more space for everyone.
They turned their garage into “a playroom for foosball, LEGO building, and roughhousing,” and in the backyard they created the dreamiest dining and working setup. The backyard before consisted of a concrete patio slab, an “ugly old fence,” and “HORRIBLE” wood chip ground cover, Sonja explains. And she and her husband, Vince, made much better use of the space.
“It took four years, four months, and 18 days of convincing [Vince] it would be easy to build, and two weeks to actually complete, including painting, styling, and setting up,” Sonja says.
There’s a new (thrifted) patio dining setup.
Sonja and Vince added an outdoor dining area under a covered pergola, and it’s full of potted plants and thrifted finds, totaling approximately $200. “It’s colorful, comfortable, simple, sustainable, and economical,” Sonja says. “Almost every table, chair, and furniture piece out there is thrifted secondhand, given to us by friends and family, or was a free curbside item.”
She says the plants make the space feel like her “very own botanical oasis” — not to mention she does some gardening in other parts of the yard, too. “It is the perfect backdrop for everything from morning coffee to a casual flip through some magazines to homework to game night to dinner alfresco to parties and entertaining,” she says.
The star of the backyard is the “shoffice.”
And in the space between the pergola and the fence, where the wood chips Sonja loathed once were, Sonja and Vince added a Costco shed on top of a poured concrete platform (so they could prove it wasn’t a “living space” to their HOA). Sonja uses the space as a shed slash office, aka a “shoffice.”
“That cost $1,500 plus tax,” Sonja explains. “It needs a foundation floor platform and some other materials, which cost about $250. We leveled the space with just the slightest slant to ensure there would never be pooling water in case of leaks.”
The shoffice isn’t finished inside with drywall, but it is painted. The exterior of the structure is painted Dunn-Edwards’ Gothic Revival Green (which matches Sonja and Vince’s front door and gate), the doors are painted black, and the interior is a pinkish white (Behr’s Night Blooming Jasmine).
The backyard feels cozier.
Sonja’s shoffice setup has shelving, artwork, office supplies, her material library (she’s a designer), and thrifted furniture. “My shoffice is my tiny oasis of all the things I love that no one will touch or move,” Sonja says, which can be important in a busy home. “I know exactly where my scissors are. I know exactly where my black Sharpies are. I know exactly where everything is.”
And as for the whole backyard, it looks “smaller, but in a good way,” Sonja says. The yard radiates coziness, which is a rarity even for most well-manicured lawns. “The eclectic vibe fits us perfectly and keeps everything feeling very relaxed and low-key, which is absolutely the energy we were going for,” Sonja says.
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