Accessorizing Your Outdoor Room Addition

The days of outdoor furnishings consisting of folding chairs with nylon woven strips or wrought iron tables and chairs are over. The increase in popularity of outdoor living has spurred on the development of many new features and accessories rated for the outdoors.

Let’s start with built-in features. Gas grills and fireplaces that are vented and connected to your home’s gas line are extremely popular with our customers right now. There are so many models intended for outdoor rooms and so many choices of material to surround them. While natural stone is quite expensive, you can get a realistic look with cultured stone (man made concrete stones that can be tinted to simulate a wide variety of masonry and stones). Traditional brick is still a good choice, but cement board finished any way you choose might offer the most options. Of course for some, nothing beats the appeal of a wood burning fireplace or fire pit, and the available surround materials are the same. If you choose to go with a fire pit, bear in mind that most municipalities have fire codes requiring them to be a certain distance from any part of the structure of your home.

If you decide on a built-in grill, you might also want to surround it with other features to create an outdoor kitchen. Add a stainless steel drawer and cabinet to store barbeque tools and serving dishes and maybe a warming drawer. True Manufacturing, a local manufacturer of the standard in commercial refrigeration all over the world, now offers high end residential refrigerators rated for outdoor environments. They are the perfect addition to an outdoor cooking/serving area. A counter top made of granite, quartz or decorative concrete creates a weather proof prepping/serving surface.

When your outdoor room is under construction, make sure to have it wired not only for ceiling fans and lighting, but also for security cameras and surround sound for music and TV. There are a lot of options out there for all of these, but planning ahead will make installation cleaner and less expensive. You will want lighting on posts and staircases for safety but outlets, speakers and lights come in lots of shapes, styles and colors and can be placed in lots of creative places so spend some time early on considering where you would like to place these items. For additional lighting, there are floor and table lamps available as well that are appropriate for the outdoors.

Outdoor furniture comes in almost as many styles and colors now as indoor furniture, yet the fabric and structure are moisture and mold repellant. Materials such as synthetic wickers, UV resistant powder coated aluminum frames, sealed wood, resin and fabrics of Textilene, Polycrylic, and other nylons and polyesters make the furniture weather resistant. With so many new outdoor fabrics, pillows, curtains and rugs are also now appropriate accessories in an outdoor room as well. Rugs are made of polypropylene and acrylic and clean up with a garden hose. You will want to create areas for both eating and for relaxing.

Art for outdoors used to be limited to statuary and wreathes, but now besides metal wall hangings, paintings are available on durable polyester surfaces and sealed with UV coatings. House walls as well as areas above fireplaces and cooking areas are perfect locations for artwork that will add color and interest to your outdoor room.

Any outdoor living area should include plants. Whether they are perennials in the ground surrounding the area or in pots, able to be moved at will, plants are the most natural thing to accessorize an outdoor room. Make your backyard retreat feel like a dessert with some cactus or like the tropics with some lush tropical plants.

However you choose to accessorize your outdoor room, make it an extension of your home by giving it all the attention to detail and expression of your personality and lifestyle that you have for the interior rooms of your home.