A rather nice new area

image from Magnific.com

You may recall that the front patio area has undergone a number of iterations over the last few years, and whilst we're not yet at the stage suggested in the picture above it's something nice to aim for 😉

When we knew that the wall would have to be rebuilt, the only sensible thing to do was to completely clear the area to give George plenty of space to work in.

Once he'd finished and cleared out the leftover bits of rubbly stone, we decided that we didn't actually want to rebuild raised beds the same as we'd had before.

There were a few slabs leftover from the new border that George had done in the shared drive on the other side of the rebuilt wall... 

...so we asked him to get a few more to make this into a proper patio area.  It took a fair bit of fiddling about on his part to get the new paving laid as evenly as possible!  Our garden is very tricky with the different levels, and an awful lot of the time what the eye sees and what the spirit level says are two rather different things 😳  

As I've already mentioned, we will be adding some planters along both the far side and front of the area to make it a tad safer!  We're going to build a raised bed along the garden side of the wooden wall, up to a similar height, which I will plant with shrubs moved from various areas of the garden.  This will create a good visual barrier across the front.

I told you last year, after my health woes, that we have decided that it would be sensible to rehash a lot of the front garden, and altering the borders somewhat is part of those plans.  This is why I'm going to be "shopping" from the plants and shrubs I already have in the garden rather than going ahead and buying in new ones.  I'm afraid the garden is going to look rather messy and upside-down for quite some time to come😏   

Once the new raised bed has been built, I will feel comfortable about moving these wooden tubs across to sit alongside the new garden wall.  Rather than leaving an expanse of bare concrete, I may well relocate the old wheelbarrow (that we turned into a planter) here from the other side of the garden.  

We moved our old garden bench out to the new patio as it looked very open and bare!  We will be buying new furniture for the space in due course, but will take our time and wait until we've got the long planter built and the tubs moved across.

Even on an overcast day, we really are so lucky to have such lovely views from our new patio 😊

As usual I am running way behind with sharing photos of what we've been doing 😏 We actually started work down in the garden area last week but hopefully I'll get you all caught up with our latest trials and tribulations soon!