The Outside

Now that you’ve seen so much of the inside of our house, it’s about time that we share some more of the outside. We haven’t managed to do a huge amount to the outside space so far, so you will have to excuse the general mess.

This is the current view of the back of the house.

Not looking great, is it? It needs a lot of work. The whole garden is covered in either tarmac or old paving stones, except for the small patch of grass we have already planted.

The little side-porch that we also refer to as our orangery (as it’s where we start to grow our fruit and veg) is falling to pieces. It’s not attached to the house properly, so it sometimes rains in.

We already told you about rebuilding of our garden posts here and here. Sadly, this is what the rest of the wall looks like.

After using some of the bricks out of the wall to rebuild the gate posts, our wall is looking even worse than before. The tarmac doesn’t improve the overall appearance. Because it’s dissolving we always end up dragging loads of little stones into the house, which is really annoying.

This is the view looking towards the garage. We’ve already started to restore the garage and have painted the garage door (read about it here), painted some of the woodwork (read about it here) and have had the rear gable wall rebuilt (read about it here). Everything else is more or less untouched.

There are a few good plants among the large selection of weeds that we would like to keep, but the majority of plants have been neglected for so many years, that we are unsure if they are salvageable.

There is so little in the garden that is worth keeping, that we assume it will be easier to start from scratch. Having said that, we have absolutely no clue about garden design or plants, so really don’t know where to start. Let us know if you have any suggestions or advice.