Front garden renovation

When we first moved to our new house the front garden was full of beautiful flowers, shrubs and trees.

It was full of plants and when I say full I mean full!!

We couldn’t park our car in the drive due to the bushes, but it looked nice!

So we had to clear it, the driveway wasn’t wide enough to fit the car on so we had to widen it, not having enough money to dig it all up and block paving slab it we just widened it with added concrete. Not nice on the eye but at least we can park the car on it.

The front garden has a job I really haven’t had much get up and go about! I am learning on how to be a gardener and what’s a weed and what’s a plant, so because of how many plants there are in the front garden I was scared off!!

By this point though I was very embarrassed of it, I am sure all the neighbours thought we haven’t been doing anything to our house by the state of the front garden. I wanted to invite them all in and show them what we had been doing since moving in!!

What do we do with it?  How much effort do we want to make? How much time do I want to spend on maintaining it?

I took to my RoomSketcher software to do a basic design idea, I have used this software to its full on my twin girls bedroom renovation

Hubby didn’t want to have to cut the small lawn that was out there already, it was full of weeds and not shape to it, so we decided gravel was the best solution for us. I wanted to keep a border of plants and flowers that I could maintain easily but not too big that I struggled to keep on top of it.

I spotted this beautiful slate from a slate quarry in Wales, I loved the different colours in it, it looks so natural. I wanted the larger size so went for the 50mm slate.

Here it is ready to start the garden renovation, I had started to clear some of the bushes at this point but still lots to clear!

I cleared out the garden but removing and chopping the large bushes right down, it looks really brutal but they will grow back and they needed a nice heathy cut! At least I can now see what we’ve got and weed properly.

I have used decking boards to edge the border but I have left them natural to soften their colour once they are weathered a bit.

The borders were then laid and lawn area was levelled

We laid membrane to stop the weeds and grass coming through (hopefully)

Sorry about the rubbish picture here with the sun on the garden! I was so keen to get the slate laid down I forgot to get another picture before!

Here is the finished result once the slate was laid down

I know it looks really bare now and I have the task of weeding out the borders and smarten it up but I think next year I will start adding more plants and flowers, I have lots of space for planting bulbs and seeds so next year it should look lovely and full again.