The pergola went up, the furniture arrived, the string lights got hung — and right now, every cold or rainy week works like this:
You check the sky before you make plans.
Not the calendar — the sky. Dinner outside depends on a forecast holding for three hours, and it never does. So the table sits set for nobody, the heater warms the open air, and everyone eats inside looking out at the space you built for exactly this.
The cushion shuffle starts again.
Clouds roll in and someone's hauling cushions to the garage. Miss it once and you're flipping soaked foam for a week, sponging mildew off fabric that cost more than the curtain you're reading about. The grill cover's somewhere. The rug never fully dries.
And the "real" fix costs more than the patio did.
You priced it. Glass rooms and polycarbonate enclosures come back in five figures, need permits, and take a season to build. So every year you do nothing, and every year the patio dies from October to April.