We moved into this house on the 30th December 2021 and since then the garden has changed dramatically. I’ve never shared any of the progress we have made in the garden here on the blog so I thought it was about time I shared some updates. If you follow me on Instagram you might have seen the pictures from today’s post before. I’ve shared regular garden updates over there and they have been very popular! So we need to go back a couple of years to see the before pictures and how we got started on our rented garden makeover.
The Before Pictures
In my mind I split the garden into 3 sections because it’s quite a long garden. So these three pictures are what I call the top end of the garden and it is mostly patio. It wasn’t a very pretty patio back in the March of 2022 😀 there was a lot of rubbish and rubble dotted around and things were overgrown and dirty.
From where the pink scooter is to where you can see the green bin and the umbrella is the “middle section” of the garden.
There was this homemade fire pit that was full of all sorts that the previous tenants had decided to try and burn. The area surrounding it was, once upon a time, gravelled but is so full of grass and weeds that it is unsalvageable. There were also brambles growing all along the left fence, Shaun had already cut some back at this point.
From this angle you can see how far over the bushes from next door were growing over!
And then here we have the middle patio. We purchased this shed as there wasn’t any storage in the garden. It was temporarily on here until we could build a base for it at the back of the garden. These fence panels are also lent up here because whoever put the fence up just gave up once they got this far. All the rest of the garden on the right hand side from this point at the patio didn’t have any fencing up. You can also see that next doors bushes/trees were even more overgrown onto our side the further down the garden you got.
And finally here is the bottom, grassed end of the garden. These trees were next doors but almost reached the middle of our garden. You can see some rubbish at the edge here but there was so much more out of sight where everything was overgrown.
This corner for example looks like just a few brambles but there was loads of rubble hidden down here. All along the bottom edge of the garden were piles of rubble hidden under cut down trees and overgrown trees.
We had a challenge on our hands! It’s taken 2 1/2 gardening seasons to get to where we are today (I’m not going to show that on here yet but if you can’t wait head to Instagram and don’t forget to give me a follow :))
Rented Garden Makeover Progress 2022
So as we went further into 2022 we got to work. The first thing we did was start cutting back all the overgrown bushes so that they were level with the fence. We also managed to straighten the fence as some of the panels had been a bit wonky before. The shed also came over to this side of the patio as we realised the other side got more sun!
For the first half of the summer we cleared all the rubbish from this side of the garden and put our furniture here so we had somewhere to sit.
We jet washed all the patio and slabs. Painted the fence and cleared this small border, filling it with wood bark. Everywhere else was still a disaster but the fence looked good! 😀
Once we had jet washed the patio we also moved our furniture set to the area directly outside the back door. Again, no where near perfect but progress was being made.
This is as much as we got done that first year. There just wasn’t as much time to focus on the garden with so much to sort inside the house (projects from inside the house that year included our wall length scaffolding shelves and our electric fire upcycle). We had still only lived here for around 8 months at this point. There have been lots of changes since of course and I will be writing about 2023’s garden progress very soon!
Lianne x
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