It takes purple pop to paint a patio purple

The soda: 500ml bottle of sparkly water, carbonated with our Sodastream Fountain Jet. After carbonation, 3 Tbsp. rhubarb syrup added for purple and tang.

The wood on our patio roof used to be a gray-blue, which matched the house until we got the exterior painted in 2011. The old colors? Gray-white with gray-blue trim, because in Oregon, we don’t see gray often enough… erm, sure. After getting some repair work done on the patio, it was time to paint the wood to match the purple trim on the rest of our green-and-purple house:

Garden with green and purple house, after painting was completed in 2011.

But you know what? Summer painting is hot and thirsty work. Bring on the purple pop! In between scrubbing, scraping, priming, first coating and final coating, I drank a lot of this purple soda, out of handy fill-’em-yourself 500ml bottles:

My faithful painting assistant

Homemade rhubarb soda + Sodastream

This rhubarb soda was made with our Sodastream Fountain Jet and a tangy homemade rhubarb syrup. Our friend Bonnie gave us a jar of the rhubarb syrup, from a recipe adapted from this: Homemade Rhubarb Syrup and the Rhubarb Daisy | The Paupered Chef. Bonnie told me she modified the recipe slightly:

I added 1 vanilla bean split and scraped to the sugar/water and also let it strain for about two hours to extract more of the liquids. This is probably best done in cheesecloth like you would do for jelly (although I did it in my strainer because I was out of cheesecloth.)

The end result was a tangy bit of purple deliciousness, though in the recipe the syrup comes out more red. The purple color was a bit of a surprise, Bonnie said, but we both thought it looked cool.

The other end result? No more gray! Our purple patio is a relaxing space for summer sitting and sipping, and come next spring, I’ll be whipping up a few batches of rhubarb syrup…

Blogger Disclosure: Anthony received a free Sodastream Fountain Jet plus an assortment of flavor mixes from Sodastream USA. That said, I only write about products I would recommend. So if I hadn’t thought it useful and awesome, I’d follow the old adage about saying nothing if I had nothing nice to say.