Tired of staring at a dull, lifeless balcony? Have you been searching for an easy and affordable way to transform your outdoor space? You can give your balcony an instant upgrade with just a few plants and strategically placed solar lighting. Not only will you be rewarded with a beautiful view, but it can also improve your mental and physical health. In this article, you’ll learn how to easily upgrade your outdoor space so you can start enjoying it by the end of the weekend.

Personally, big projects can overwhelm me easily. Therefore, I like to break them down into parts.

Last summer, I completed the first part of my balcony upgrade. First, I bought these interlocking wood tiles and artificial grass tiles for my patio. Then, I got an outdoor patio set that could hide additional seating within itself — check out my blog post about it for more details!

Now, I am in the process of stepping up my balcony game even more!

For the second part of my balcony upgrade, I have added a plant to my patio to bring it more life.

Luckily, you don’t have to have a green thumb to recreate this look — it’s simpler than you think!

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Steps for upgrading your balcony

In this article, I’ll walk you through:

• Making a balcony vision board
• My thought process for deciding which plants to get for your balcony
• Ways to fill planters
• Popular finishing touch options for planters
• Taking it to the next level with landscape lighting

To start, check out my YouTube video if you want a quick overview of how I upgraded my balcony. Obviously, don’t forget to subscribe to my channel!

Make a vision for your balcony

First, you should get an idea of the broader picture of how you want your balcony to look. Unfortunately, I struggle to image things in my head. Therefore, I made a mood board for how I envisioned my balcony (that incorporated the things I already did last summer).

If you don’t do this first, then the individual parts of your balcony upgrade may not be cohesive and the end result may not look as good as you had hoped.

Luckily, you aren’t tied down to what you put on your mood board. It’s more of a general guidance to make sure you aren’t putting things that do not go well with the broader picture you imagined for your balcony.

Now that you have your mood board, where should you start?

To start, one of the easiest ways to modernize your balcony or patio is to add plants!

Which plants do you want on your balcony?

First, you need to figure out where you want to add the plants so you know how much space you have to work with.

Additionally, the space you choose could dictate the type of plant you get. For example, if you want to get real ones, then you need to take into account the type of sun the plant would be getting in this area and choose a plant that thrives in that environment.

Personally, I don’t know enough about plants, have the desire to keep up with taking care of it, or want to worry about it being toxic for my pets. Therefore, I opted for artificial plants.

Like I mentioned earlier, I made a cute little grass corner from artificial grass tiles last summer (see image below). I knew I wanted to use this space for my plant.

Next, I had to figure out what would look the best in this area.

As you can see, it’s an odd shape, so it is not the easiest to plan out what to put. After thinking about it, I figured I could probably fit one plant or two plants max in this tiny corner.

While I was trying to plan this out, I actually made a blog post about ideas for upgrading your balcony in case anyone would find it helpful. Through this process, I decided I definitely wanted to use the Bambusa Bamboo Artificial Tree.

However, I was struggling to envision whether I should use this alone or add another plant with it. On top of that, I was struggling with which planter to use. I love the look of those modern box planters, but I felt like that wouldn’t look good with the space I was working with because of all the weird angles. To help make this easier, I actually put images of the plants / planters on top of the image of the corner to help me visualize it.

Hopefully, you appreciate me showing these examples since they are very rough drafts. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ 

Thankfully, you don’t have to make it perfect. The goal is to just give yourself a rough idea of what you like. Personally, I didn’t want to waste time trying to learn how to use a fancy software just for this. However, that’s another option to help you visualize it!

Eventually, I decided I liked the second example and wanted to move forward with that option.

How do you fill a huge planter?

To start, I googled ways to fill up a huge outdoor planter and stumbled across this article.

Luckily, the article spells out a lot of options. First, you need to decide if you want lightweight pot fillers or heavy pot fillers. Once you do that, you can decide between the options listed below.

Lightweight Pot Fillers

Compostable Materials

• Coconut fiber
• Paper cups
• Wood chips
• Sphagnum moss
• Recycled cardboard pieces
• Pinecones

Non-Biodegradable Materials

• Styrofoam peanuts/ packing peanuts
• Crushed soda cans
• Foam blocks
• Plastic milk jugs
• Plastic bottles/ plastic containers
• Bubble wrap
• Empty potting soil bag
• Empty plastic

Heavy Pot Fillers

Compostable Materials

• Broken ceramic
• Wood logs
• Tree branches

Non-Biodegradable Materials

• Large rocks
• Broken pieces of concrete
• Gravel
• Sand
• Glass pebbles
• Empty beer or wine bottles
• Old golf balls

Eventually, I decided to use an IKEA box that had been delivered broken. Luckily, it fit inside of the planter, so I flipped it upside down to help fill the planter. Then, I used the styrofoam that came in the box for the planter to fill the remaining space. Additionally, the flat part of it made a nice, flat surface for the rocks.

Now, how do I give my plants a nicer finish?

Right now, moss and rocks are very popular options!

As you can see, I opted for rocks because I know that my balcony gets a lot of wind and I didn’t want to worry about the moss flying away.

Lastly, add the final touch with landscape lighting

Finally, another easy way to take your outdoor space to the next level is with easy-to-install solar lighting. On top of that, landscape lighting is a great way to make your balcony or patio look more luxurious.

If you are interested, my other blog post goes over a lot of different solar-powered lighting options. However, I went with a solar powered option that had a cord that I could hide in the planter under the foam and rocks. This way, I could have the solar panel facing the direction that would get the most direct sunlight and have the spotlight on the side of the planter that people on my balcony would see.

As you can see, a simple little light can make a big difference in how luxurious your balcony looks. It’s a really low-cost option to get that expensive look! Additionally, not having to worry about having an outlet or worrying about running up your electric bill are great added benefits!

Next, I will be adding a privacy screen wall with plants and solar powered lights as well as adding a small rock path, so stay tuned!

However, if you don’t love how I did it, check out my blog post that walks through ways to upgrade your balcony / patio / outdoor space!