Hey guys, it’s been a little while since I’ve written a blog post but we have been going through a strange time haven’t we.

The garden has been grating on me as it never got finished the last time around, and it was all a bit mismatched. It needed some urgent TLC.

Firstly the garden is a small cottage garden, very quirky and nothing is as you can imagine…in a straight line ha. We already had a corner sofa that I purchased a couple of years ago so we had some furniture but only enough to seat three. No good if your wanting guests around.

We have more space than you might initially think but it needed some clever planning. There is part of the garden that is split off behind a 200 year old wall…great for storage but unfortunately for me the previous owner left a lot of debris in there including train sleepers, bricks, rubble, old broken plant pots, lots of broken garden tools, random spirit level, a brown bin full of ash from the house fire, along with half a tonne of rubble, gas canisters, pallets, roof tiles….you name it, it was dumped in the garden and left for me to clear!

We have great neighbours and they let us use their skip for free which saved us so much money and time. We were able to clear out everything but the bin full of ash. But it’s so much better and now we can store the other three bins away which instantly made the garden feel cleaner and tidier.

First job complete. Now we can plan out what we actually want to do. Yey!

First up paint the pergola black, clear all of the guttering and build a scaffold board wall. My partners dad managed to source our boards for us which was brilliant…cost FREE.

We used Wickes own outdoor black wood paint for the pergola. We needed x3 1.5 litre tins to cover it properly. £18 a tin. Needed a new paint brush and bucket too along with white spirit to clean brushes.

Joe cut all of the scaffold boards as he went, to create a brick effect. Firstly he built a frame and plugged the wall and then measured and cut the boards. We had to make some small cuts at the bottom to allow for the down pipe from the guttering and drain. This took around a day to do, it was heavy lifting, but looks super effective. We love it so much. Because the pergola is now black we wanted to keep the natural wood effect to soften. As it’s a smaller size garden we need light, natural and uplifting so need to be savvy with colour placement.

Next up on our to do list is the pavers. We don’t have the funds to replace these so upcycle it is. Incoming Dulux Weather-shield masonary pale slate £21 a tin. We also invested in some cheap car wash sponges to apply the paint, they cane in at a whopping 0.50p each! This is going to be the base for our future vision.

The end result were after is a rustic stencilled washed end result. We purchased a custom size stencil from Dizzy Duck Designs. This was about £40 including delivery. Included in the price is a quarter stencil of the same design for any smaller or more tricky areas which is brilliant. The stencil arrived pretty quickly too.

We waited patiently for a dry windy day to get the paint on the pavers. The Weathersheild is tough dry in around 30 mins and in the wind even quicker. Once this was dry we got the stencil straight out. We knew that the pavers weren’t going to be lined up correctly so there was going to be imperfections and parts that wouldn’t line up, but we were absolutely fine with that.

Surprisingly the stencilling was straight forward but it requires a lot of patience…this is by no means a rush job. If your going to do this, take your time and wash the stencil every now and again to ensure clean working. It took us around 1.5 hours to stencil x21 pavers. Not bad going I don’t think for first timers haha.

Next project decking an area of dead space. At the bottom of the garden is a small stoned area that never gets used and really needed some TLC. We figured if we could make a base out of decking then we could have an extra space for another seating area. More of a bistro area with two chairs and a small table.

Again all hail joes dad who very kindly gifted us the decking (yes we have amazing family)!

We absolutely love the finished result. Still some finishing touches to to but all of the big changes have been done.

We can now have more people round to visit and socialise with in the garden, and it’s such a beautiful place to sit out and listen to the birds in a morning.

Since completing the garden my fiancé threw me a surprise 30th birthday bash and everyone loved what we had done with it all.

Stay tuned for more to come, Thankyou for reading Sarah xXx