I’ve lived in Snug Cottage a year and 6 months now, and have had visions of what I would like the garden to look like.

It had to look like a secret garden, dishevelled brickwork, pergola draped in wisteria, a lovely patio with a corner sofa, and some pretty flowers. That’s not too much to ask for is it?

I decided to get some quotes for work to be done to see if it was something I could afford to do, as I didn’t want to spend another summer without my garden retreat.

The dreams were shattered when the quote for decking using scaffolding boards came back at £4K! I literally laughed out loud, such a rip off, so I came up with a plan to do it myself, after all it wasn’t that I didn’t want to do the work, it was more so finding the time, as my weekends and time at home are precious.

Let’s give it a go!

Let’s recycle as much from the current garden as possible to see if I could achieve something near to my goal first, without too much expense.

No set plan put in place, but I did have a vision, and with the help of family doing the labour the garden was underway.

Current garden

Rotten pergola in need of some serious sanding, treating and painting, rotten reed (also a fire hazard been next to the boiler vent) and the reed was also hiding a huge hole! Lights that didn’t work, and a rotten seating area full of rubbish and spiders.

There was lots to be done, but let’s go through what I did last summer (that sounds like a movie headline).

The secret garden had some hidden secrets of its own…. in the bottom corner hidden under train sleepers and broken up concrete was a coal bunker. This was a great find, and shows the character and true age of the property. What was unearthed next wasn’t a lovely find!… a five foot deep, eight foot long void filled with gas cylinders, roof tiles, rubble, bricks, pallets, general rubbish, overgrown and out of control ivy, it was a very unpleasant find.

This is one of the reasons plans for the garden last year took a back seat.

Dad to the rescue…

In total there was just over a tonne and half of waste and thanks to my dad who spent a full weekend in the void removing it all we managed to clear it! It was back breaking, exhausting and who knows why the hell it had all been put down there is beyond me! But it has gone now and a year on and the walls have dried out, I have just about killed the ivy off and can now move on with the garden.

He may be nearly 70 but he’s a top grafter, trick of all trades, and no job is too big for him, he just cracks on with it.

The weekend after the big clear out he then replaced all of my guttering at the back of the house as that was all wooden and rotten too…he’s such a legend!

May 2018

Let’s fast forward a year (mainly because I haven’t been out there since, apart from to take the bins out)!

It was coming upto the end of May bank holiday and I had a full weekend off yey! This is a rarity, so I wanted to make the absolute most of it.

Friday was a late one as I went to see the wonderful Ed Sheeran in Manchester, didn’t get home until 1.30am. That didn’t stop me from getting up Saturday morning 7.30am, ready and waiting for the shops to open to buy bags of stone (12 bags of them to be precise). Now remember I’m trying to recycle whatever I can in the garden currently.

Once the stones were purchased and I was back home the entourage turned up….Mum, Dad and my Niece Chloe. I won’t lie I only expected to demolish the wooden seating area, fill in some stones and pop some new plants down….but Mum had other ideas!

As a family we never do things by half, so Mum suggested we could do some rearranging and make the best from what I had so we turfed up half of the garden pavers. I love a good bit of manual labour! On the plus side it gets me out of the gym too.

Using the stones that were in the garden already and some of the sand from underneath the current paving stones, we levelled off the pergola area in an attempt to make a patio (which is what I wanted). We relaid the pavers and success the rectangular patio was assembled.

The previous placing of the pavers were on some weird dot and dab format so we chiselled as many of them up as we could, without taking our eyeballs out (safety glasses would be recommended).

Once the pavers were laid, my niece painted the walls white for me…she’s such a little gem and a brilliant helper.

Me and Mum pinned up the artificial ivy to the pergola (I sanded and painted the pergola last summer in white). I hopped up onto the roof to pin down the corrugated plastic, so I still had a dry area of the garden. Cleaned out the guttering whilst I was up there.

Tea break!

After a short tea break it was time to lay the new stones, and assemble the new corner sofa and table. By this time (5 hours in we were all a bit tired, and aching) but we marched on and got the job done.

Okay so remember that silly quote I was given haha….see ya! Here’s the finished result…

So let’s go through costs;

• Pavers (recycled)
• Bamboo (recycled)
• Stones and sand to level garden (recycled)
• Pergola (up-cycled)
• Paint for Pergola B&Q £15.00
• New stones Asda 3 for £9 (I bought 12 bags)
• Corner sofa £200 (was £500 I kept watching out for a sale) these can be purchased from many places, eBay, B&Q, B&M, garden stores etc
• Artificial ivy on trellis £17.99 a strip (I used x2 strips)
• Wisteria (was a gift from Mum a year ago) the pot it is now in is recycled from that big hole
• The compost used was also recycled from that big hole
• Candles were gifts from Christmas (white company pomegranate)
• Candle holders B&Q £10.99 and £8.99
• Cushions and blanket were spares from inside the cottage
• Lanterns (recycled)
• Lights were ones from my old bedroom that I stole from my mums garden (she totally knows that too)

Total cost of sprucing up the secret garden at Snug Cottage £306.96

Not too shabby at all. So next time you get a silly quote and have a vision of your own, get your gardening clothes on, invite the tribe around, and see where your creativity takes you.

What makes it really worthwhile is when someone comments on your picture and says they thought it was an ideal home advert! That really made my day.

Having the garden now gives me more of a social space to entertain, as I don’t have a dining area.

Since the garden has been completed I have had my niece and nephew around for evening movies on the ipad, with hot chocolates and popcorn out there, I invited the family around for a bbq and fell asleep out there listening to the owls, and then had breakfast out there this morning whilst listening to the birds. I pretty much haven’t left the garden at all.

I love the outdoors, and now I have my own tranquil space that feels like another room of my cottage. I can’t wait for more weekends to entertain out there, enjoy the fresh air, and listen to those birds some more.

Thankyou for reading my secret garden blog, I hope you got some tips out of it, and enjoyed the transformation. Sarah xXx