Planning Our Dream Garden

*This is a collaborative post on planning our dream garden, but all words and opinions are my own

Ever since we moved into our home almost five years ago we’ve concentrated on the inside. And we’re so close to being finished, although what does finish really mean!? But the next thing we’re starting to think about is planning our dream garden.

We’re not massive outdoor people but I love the idea of having a nice outdoor space to enjoy. While the garden is in a much better state than it once was it’s still a bit of a mess.

It’s going to take us a while to get where we want as garden work isn’t cheap. In fact we’ve had a think of some upcycle garden ideas to get started with, but here’s what we’d love to do to get our dream garden.

Build an outdoor room

Our garden is reasonably big and there’s a lot of potential out there so we’ve decided that we’re going to put an outdoor room in the back corner of our garden.

This means we’ll need to remove all the plants (and cut back some trees) to make space. But we’re looking at a two room space so that half can turn into a workout area and the other half will be a gaming space for Luke. This means I can move a bunch of my workout bits from our third bedroom. And it should give me much more floor space to workout.

Our dream garden needs new decking

We have quite a lot of decking in our garden because the garden space wraps around our house rather than just going back from the house. So we have a huge section which is decked, but the quality of it isn’t great.

Our elderly next door neighbour has a massive apple tree which malts over our garden so that needs cutting back. But there’s also some nasty bine weed coming from her garden. We did buy some industrial strength weed killer to remove what we coming through our decking, but I dread to think of the state underneath the decking slabs.

Short term we think we’re going to buy some decking tiles from Ikea to cover the space and make it look a bit neater. But longer term we’d love to rip it all out and re-do the whole space. It means that the old pond that is semi filled in can be properly covered and we’ll have full use of all of the decking,

Our dream garden may get slimmed down with an extension

We’re hoping to do a double story side-of-house extension in about two years time. And as I mentioned our garden wraps round our home so the extension would take up some of the garden space. This isn’t an issue at all because it’s currently a second driveway which we rarely ever use.

But we don’t want to do too much to that space around the side until we know for sure if the extension is going to happen. And if so what mess that covers up.

Eventually we’ll probably opt for AstroTurf

As you’ve probably gathered from this post me and Luke don’t have green fingers. So anything we can do to ease the upkeep we’re going to do.

And once we know exactly how much lawn space we’ll have (after the outdoor room and extension) I expect we’ll rip up the patchy lawn there at the moment and replace it with AstroTurf.

What things would you want in your dream garden?