Summer Outdoor Living & Garden Tour 2021 – Previous Zone 6B Home

Tour the outdoor living spaces and gardens of my previous Zone 6B home in summer 2021, featuring container gardens, flowers, and cozy backyard style.

Hi! I’m Stacy Ling, a trained Master Gardener gardening in Zone 6B here in New Jersey. Before moving to my 1850 farmhouse, I gardened in my previous home for twenty three years. This outdoor living and garden tour from summer 2021 shows how I styled our deck, patio, and backyard with container gardens, fresh flowers, and cozy outdoor touches. I love sharing these older tours as part of my gardening journey so you can see how my gardens and outdoor spaces evolved over time.

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Welcome to My Outdoor Living in Summer Home Tour

As an avid gardener, I enjoy creating beautiful outdoor living spaces that incorporate lots of plants, flowers, and organic elements to create a cozy and relaxing atmosphere for my family and friends.

Throughout spring, I was working on these spaces by planting container gardens, setting up outdoor living furniture and creating new beds, like my new raised beds for my homegrown vegetable and herbs.

Now that my planting and decorating efforts are coming to a close, I want to share how it all looks this year!

Have you been getting ready for summer too?

Where I Live

I live in a quiet suburban neighborhood in New Jersey. We are about an hour from NYC, an hour from the Poconos, and an hour from the Jersey Shore.

We can get the best of everything here depending on what direction you travel.

My husband and I bought our home 23 years ago and have made SO MANY changes to it!

We’ve pretty much updated every square inch of our home.

And it all started with ripping the roof off of our 3 bedroom ranch to build a 4 bedroom center hall colonial.

One of the earliest home improvement projects that I have no pictures from, is the deck renovation where my husband built our two-tier deck.

He’s pretty amazing.

I updated and painted our kitchen by myself. It looks so amazing! You can see the full transformation HERE.

Wait until you see what it looked like before.

We recently renovated the main floor bathroom and laundry rooms. Spruced up the living room, dining room, and front entry.

We even just did a total closet makeover!

To tour the inside of my home CLICK HERE.

Now that you’ve seen some of the updates and toured my home, let me show you the outdoor living spaces.

Because they’ve come a long way too!

Outdoor Living Spaces in Summer Home Tour

If you’ve been following me for a while you know how much I LOVE my outdoor living spaces.

These spaces didn’t always look this great.

I made a lot of mistakes along the way.

Because I love plants and flowers, they fill my outdoor living spaces in both the gardens and my deck and fire pit areas. I mean look at those gorgeous superwave petunias overflowing in my hanging baskets!

Outdoor Dining on the Upper Deck

As I mentioned earlier, we have a two-tiered deck that my husband built about 20 years ago.

The upper deck has always been used for dining.

For many years, we could never sit out here and enjoy it because the hot summer New Jersey sun made it unbearable for most of the day.

But a few years ago, I found an awesome gazebo like this one and it’s been life-changing.

We are out here all the time now!

Enjoying Sunsets on the Lower Deck

For many years, we significantly underutilized this deck.

Sad, I know right?

We had a cute outdoor wicker set similar to this one, but just didn’t use the space much.

I recently gave it a makeover by adding THIS conversation set with gas fire pit.

And now?

We are out here all the time.

As much as I love our real outdoor fire pit, it is so nice to be able to enjoy a quick fire without the fuss.

The Fire Pit Garden

This area used to serve little purpose after we dismantled our kids’ playhouse. It accumulated lots of debris and brush.

And just looked terrible!

Not anymore.

A few years ago, my husband built this fire pit for Mother’s Day. We purchased a pallet of stone and he dry-stacked it in place.

Since building it, we’ve enjoyed lots of cozy nights in front of the fire with our family and friends.

And last year, we added these solar string lights to help light up the fire pit garden better.

I never took these lights down since putting them up last year.

It’s been almost a year now that they’ve been up and they still work AWESOME!

It is so convenient that they just take care of themselves, turning on and off at dusk and dawn.

And if you’re curious about the lanterns, they are my favorite. You can get ones similar to them HERE.

Thanks for stopping by my spring home tour.

If you’d like to walk the gardens too, CLICK HERE.

I hope you’ll come back and visit again!

Be sure and stop by my friend Jennifer from Cottage on Bunker Hill who is the next stop on the Bloggers Best Summer Home Tour.

Thanks for stopping by the blog today!

Enjoy your day! xoxo