Fixing umbrella

Yet another project! This time it's our outdoor umbrella.  The rope on the inside had snapped and so we couldn't open it up properly.  We thought about buying a new outdoor umbrella but geez, it was a lot more than I had expected!  The fabric on the inside of the umbrella looked kinda icky too.  Urgh, but after watching a few more videos online, I can do this! :-)

First off, we need to take off the fabric.  I think that was the easy part:

And then it's taking care of that broken rope on the inside:

It was a bit tricky trying to get that new rope threaded through the inside of the umbrella, but with Graham's help - we did it!!  A couple of old wire hangers came in handy for sure.  Yay!!

The top part of the umbrella looks like it's getting a rather thin and fray:

Sooooo... time to improvise.  I knew I saved these old swim trunks for a reason.  I just couldn't get myself to throw these away.  I really like the fabric/bright flower patterns:

Here goes!

Ta da!!!  It's not the best but hope this umbrella will at least last one more summer:

Time to finally test it out again.  Hopefully we fixed that rope properly and it doesn't come snapping back down on Charlie's head.  We'll never hear the end of that one.  Ha!

Well, I'm happy to report that the umbrella is working great.  And the new rope only cost about $10 compared to a new umbrella that would have been about $70!  

The wind did knock the umbrella over last week and it put a hole in that gutter that you see in the photo above.  Sheesh!  Thankfully it was towards the top of the gutter and not the bottom. Yet one more thing to fix with this house!!