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6 simple and effective budget-friendly ideas on how you can freshen up your garden and outdoor living space.
How do our composite decking boards look 5 years after installation in our wet UK garden?
A simple reuse and recycle DIY - see how I create this potting table from a delivery crate!
Refresh your outside space this summer with my round-up of the best garden lounge chairs, rockers and recliners…
My house needed a facelift. Lots of bad British weather, a leaky gutter and rotting windows were just not doing this beautiful Georgian building any justice. A priority was sorting out the front door. Placed perfectly in the centre of the symmetrical exterior, the front door is the focal point when you look at my house from the street. Having not been touched in well over 5 years, the door was faded and cracked. While the conservative, Oxford blue that it once was didn’t give me any pangs of excitement when I looked at it.
For the past two days I have been in attendance at the Chelsea Flower Show: the world-renowned, quintessentially British, annual celebration of all things horticultural. It has been a delight. As a lover of colour and a pretty flower, there is nowhere better to soak-up a sunshine filled day. The show is also attended by the creative elite - from interior and furniture designers to actors and musicians - the show provides incredible inspiration and sows the seed (if you will) to many new designs and ideas. This year there were a few key themes, messages and colours which I think will infiltrate the way we design and style our homes, plus affect the purchases we make.
So, our new composite deck is complete! Landscapers The Greenkeeper spent two weeks dismantling our rotten timber deck, building new framework and installing Trex deck boards and accompanying railing. If you missed the big reveal then you can find it here. If you want to see the build process then click here. Otherwise, I spent a lot of time chatting to The Greenkeeper during the deck build and it was a real eye-opener to how the innovative product of composite deck is revolutionising our exteriors. With its zero-maintenance appeal and eco-credentials, it is the perfect product for the time-poor consumer who would prefer to invest in sustainable materials within their home. I thought it would be interesting to do a Q&A with The Greenkeeper to find out all about how they came to be Trex Pro installers, and why they think that Trex is the future of decking, especially in the UK....
I am SO excited to finally reveal on the blog my brand new decking area, made from Trex Transcend Composite Decking and Trex Signature Railings. If you’ve been following our garden overhaul progress you will have seen why I had given up on our traditional timber deck, as well as a progress report of the build. This post is all about how the finished decking area now looks and how I have styled it so it is perfect for alfresco dinners and summer parties. So, without further delay, here are all the final photos of my finished raised decking area in my garden. As you can imagine, I am delighted with how it has turned out!
Last week on the blog I talked about my big garden plans and how I had given up on our rotten, raised timber deck area of our garden. Instead, it was all going to be ripped out and replaced by something called Trex Transcend - a strong and durable composite decking made from 95% recycled materials. Well, as you can tell from the header image to this post (!!) the exciting news is that the big garden overhaul has begun! Landscape company The Greenkeeper arrived to dismantle and and re-lay the deck just over a week ago. After some initial framework problems, the actual installation of the Trex Deck was pretty interesting to watch. So, here is the build progress so far.....
Hello and welcome to my garden! I have not featured the garden on my blog in a long time and with good reason - it is a disaster that I just cannot keep on top of. Well, not the garden itself but actually the decking area. We have a really large area of the garden that is raised decking, but the truth is the past couple of years it hasn't even been used - in fact I've actively cornered it off as I feel it is unsafe for the family.
Bank holiday weekends for me, like a lot of people, are all about DIY! The three-day period just gives that extra amount of time to complete any projects both inside and outside of the home. With the bank holiday weekend just gone having been dry, warm and sunny, I used this time to spruce up my outdoor balcony. It had been a few years since I had painted the deck boards in this space and they were looking weathered and bare. The metal railings had also peeled and cracked in the sun from summers gone-by. This summer, I wanted to bring an old wooden bench that had been left at the bottom of the garden up on the balcony as a colourful seating area, so I set about transforming the deck, railings and the bench using exterior paints by Sandtex and Sadolin.
I have a small balcony accessed via some arched doors from my living area that is an absolute sun trap, so in the summer months I spend more time here than in the garden. Last year I created a really kitsch miami-pink style space here, which although was fun for one summer, it did not work at all with the living space and felt completely disjointed. This year I really wanted the area to be an extension of my living room as I felt it would work better than as a completely separate area to it. I wanted the furniture to be really good quality, while also fit in with the stylish pieces I had indoors. My living room is a warm blue hue, so when I discovered that Marks & Spencer were focusing on Artisan Blues for Spring/Summer 2018, I just had to check out their Alfresco range of garden furniture and accessories.
This week is British Flowers Week - but did you know only 10% of flowers sold in Britain are grown here? To highlight this fact, and to celebrate our home-grown flowers and foliage, New Covent Garden Flower Market launched British Flowers Week in 2013 to promote British flowers, their growers and the independent florists working with them. One of those independent florists is Agent F, whose bouquets are a riot of colour and who I first met just before Xmas when I made a festive table centrepiece with them.
These six improvements will elevate your garden…