The whole thing was one of the most expensive things that we've ever done and it wasn't particularly easy to live through, especially so whilst having two young children. When I look back at pictures and videos that I took during the renovations I don't quite know how we didn't go grey! But then when I look back and compare the before to the after, it was all SO very worth it to make our house into a proper family home for us to live and grow in for the foreseeable future.
What didn't help, and you'll know this already if you followed our renovation journey is that we asked our builder who helped build our extension to do the garden. We trusted him a lot after seeing how hard he'd worked on the extension, so we had no reason to believe he'd end up taking quite a lot of money off of us and leaving us with a mud pit out the back that was too dangerous for our boys to even set foot in. He also failed to pay the sub-contractors he'd hired, despite us paying him and the whole thing became a big awful, horrible mess. One that we're still trying to forget and move on from.
But in the end, we managed to find a really good builder in our neighbor across the road, who we paid to sort out the mess we'd been left in. He did a really fantastic job and we've been left so pleased with the outcome (despite how long it's taken us to get here).
We've had a little bit of nice weather recently, and so we took the chance to finally (after a year of not really being able to go out there) use our garden and finally crack out our new garden furniture set, which I've been waiting to do for what had felt like forever! And whilst the weather was so lovely I thought I'd take a few photos (and a video which you can find below) to show you what our garden looks like now compared to what it did before. OUR GARDEN BEFORE
THE GARDEN AFTERWARDS
When I compare the before and afters of our garden I really can't believe how much of a change there's been! It feels like a totally different garden now. Our garden is only small, but I feel like getting rid of all of the bushes and making the ground flat has really given us the full use of the space that we do have out there. Now, we have space to sit out there a family on the decking, we can eat out there, we can socialise out there or we can just sit on our furniture and just chill with a book. I'll even be able to do some work out in the garden when the weather is warmer, which I'm so excited for!
The boys have so much more room to play now - they can outside with their ride-ons and their scooters or they can play football. Making the ground flat and getting rid of all of the broken bricks and pavement that had been left behind by the previous owners, has given the boys so much more room to play.
BEFORE
AFTER
Our garden was such a mess and really was calling out for a bit of love. It had been a dream of ours to be able to be in a position where we could make it into the space we'd hoped to one day have.
I had always wanted a decking area with a rattan furniture set and I'm over the moon with ours. We have composite decking and one of my favorite things about the decking is the lights that we had put in - I think they look really modern and cosy at nighttime when it's dark. We found our furniture set on eBay and we're really pleased with how spacious it is. It also comes with three additional rattan stools for when we have people over.
We always knew that we wanted to go artificial with our garden. Mostly because we don't have the time to maintain real grass and real plants. Plus I also know nothing about gardening and am not a green-fingered sort of person at all. We bought all of our artificial plants from IKEA and our grass was bought online.
We have big glass doors and windows in our living room that look out to our back garden and so having the garden done has also made such a nice difference to our living room too. In the summer we'll be able to have both of our living room doors open on to our garden and it'll feel like a really nice extension to our home.
As you'll remember if you've followed our renovation journey, we removed our garage to make room for the front side extension. The garage was falling apart and was a complete mess so it was nice to see it go. We've now got a second back door from our kitchen (which has a cat flap on) and an alleyway that leads down to a gate at the front.
We've replaced the garage with a shed which is neatly organised and even has a light that comes on automatically as soon as you open the doors. Next to the shed we've got the boys playhouse and also a log store to hold our logs for our wood burner. It's for practical reasons but I actually love how how rustic it looks in the garden.
I couldn't resist a snap of the sun - in February!
I'm so excited to own a fire pit for our garden - I can't wait to sit out with Adam and use it during the cosy, summer evenings!
And that is our new garden! We're so so pleased with it and we can't wait to spend many summer days and evenings out there finally enjoying it! If you have any questions or want to know where anything is from, then please feel free to ask in the comment section down below. :)
WATCH THE VIDEO:
Thank you for reading. Alex xo