Our Autumn Garden Makeover

Most people are sensible and do their garden makeovers in Spring/early Summer to make the most of their gardens in the warmer weather.  To be fair this was our plan too but injured workmen, camping and rainfall meant that our makeover this year didn’t go quite to plan.

Trouble Spots

Like most gardens, our garden has always had its problem areas.  As a North facing garden we get the sunshine on part of the garden for the morning, the majority of the garden in the early/mid-afternoon and then the section closest to the garden wall becomes shadier as the afternoon turns to dusk.  The result of this is that the grass has never grown well and can look very patchy.  We have tried all kinds of fixes but nothing worked as we hoped so then I came up with the idea to deck this area.

Decking

Last Summer Simon spent most evenings and weekends creating a raised decking area which would house the Rabbit Hutch, Barbeque and Garden Seating.  Ever the perfectionist, there are aspects of his workmanship that he isn’t happy with but I think he did a great job.  Our plan for this year was to continue to make our garden work for us.

Tile Mountain

I was provided with the opportunity to work with Tile Mountain.  We have used Tile Mountain previously to purchase our kitchen/dining room floor tiles so we knew they were suppliers of high-quality materials and jumped at the chance.  Our original plan was to create a path from our patio area outside the back door to the decking area so that we could feed the rabbits or access the decking without walking on the grass and traipsing the mud back into the house.

Tile Mountain kindly sent us the Surface Outdoor Sand Porcelain garden slabs from their Portico Outdoor Slab range for this project.  As we began laying the slabs out, we felt the path looked too wide for the garden and then realised that if we only made the path one slab wide, we would have enough slabs left over to cover the area behind the garage, in front of the children’s playhouse.  This would give them a clean area to play in wet weather, rather than the soggy bark they had got used to (and avoided).

Simon laid the slabs by first digging down a layer or two and filling with hardcore, then levelling it and applying sharp sand and cement.  The result is a very clean, smooth path to the rabbits and decking as well as a lovely bright, open area in front of the playhouse.  We love it!

Valspar Paint

We made the decision a few years ago to move away from traditional fence paint colours and have loved it.  It’s something we are always complimented on.  This year we knew that we needed to give the fence spruce up but couldn’t decide whether to stick with the same colours or try something a little different.  We selected a slightly brighter ‘stone’ colour for the fences from the Valspar Garden colours paint and then chose three bright colours to paint the crossbars; pink, blue and green.  I did worry that it might look a little like a preschool garden but actually, I love the effect now it is finished.

Novasol Spray

I have long been coveting the Novasol Spray Paints from all of the amazing craft projects which Kara at Innocent Charms has undertaken.  Our small child’s bench in the garden has become very sun-bleached but still has lots of wear left in it so we gave it a coat of PintyPlus Tech Ferric Primer as an undercoat and then gave it a new lease of life with the PintyPlus Evolution Spray in Sky Blue.  The children are over the moon with their new-look bench.

Still to do . . .

Sadly, after a rather savage hail and thunderstorm our Wayfair Rattan Effect Garden Sofa Set ended up with a number of big holes and parts snapped off after the sofa and chairs blew into a wall.  We are on the lookout for the perfect replacement to really set out seating area off and we are also looking for some sort of garden screening to partition the patio area from the garden.