Have you been looking out of your window throughout the Christmas period and wishing your backyard looked different? Perhaps it is time for a complete redesign. Perhaps it’s just time to tidy it all up and make a few small changes. The choice is yours, and whichever you pick, the results will be impressive.
Spring is only just around the corner, and by springtime you really want your backyard to be ready to bloom beautifully. That means getting prepared now. Some of the work can be done immediately, and the rest can be done as the warmer weather starts to appear; as long as you are prepared and know what you want to do in your outdoor space, the possibilities are endless. Here are some ways to get started.
Have Less Lawn
In some backyards, the lawn is a big focal point, but it isn’t always very interesting, and it requires a good amount of maintenance to keep it neat and trim. Reducing the size of your lawn may sound like a big job, but it is actually easy, and simply requires you to dig up and remove the areas you no longer want.
Once the lawn is gone, you can replace it with anything that takes your fancy, and that suits your garden and personality. You might choose to install pathways and water features, or additional flower beds, for example.
Not only will you be reducing the amount of work you’ll need to do in your backyard, but you will also be making it look a lot more interesting too. Unless you have dogs that need to run on the grass or children who want to play on it, there is no reason why you should keep the lawn if all you are doing is mowing it all throughout the summer and ignoring it all winter.
Add A Shed
Sheds in the backyard are extremely useful; they are the ideal places to keep your garden tools and implements safe, or you might want to store something even more valuable such as a bike or quad bike inside it. Alternatively, a shed can be kept as a space for you to be alone, where you can relax and unwind away from the chaos and noise that you might experience in your house.
A shed doesn’t even have to a ‘shed’ but can instead by something much better looking and more useful. You can have an entire workroom built in your garden, or an office space with sound proofed walls and comfortable furniture, lighting, heating, and electricity. If you work from home this can be an amazing way to ‘commute’ to a different space which is solely for work and then return home, locking work away behind you.
Make Your Paving Impressive
What is your paving like at the moment? If it needs some sprucing up, now is the time to do it. You can hire a jet washer at a reasonable rate from lots of different plant hire companies, and often all that is require to do this is a credit card, such as the First Premier credit card. Once you have the machine, you can quickly and easily clean up the paving that you already have. You’ll be amazed at the difference just a clean up can make, and your paving will look brand new again.
If your paving is a little worse for wear, and is perhaps cracked or damaged, making it difficult – or even dangerous – to walk across, then it should be replaced rather then simply cleaned up. There are dozens of different options when it comes to which type of paving you can have; different colors and styles, different shapes, and even different materials. It will depend on your budget and how you want the final look of your backyard to come together, so it is worth doing some research to ensure you have picked exactly what you want.
Make An Al Fresco Eating Space
If you’re making your garden look better and redesigning it, then why not add a space where you can eat al fresco whenever you want to? If you currently don’t eat outside at all, or you just bring plastic chairs and a table onto the paving or the lawn when the weather is good enough, then you are missing out on many other opportunities to have a great outdoor meal.
Rather than being at the mercy of the weather, you can design a gazebo or similar covered structure with cushioned seating where everyone can sit and enjoy a great meal cooked on the grill (or even cooked inside and eaten in the yard). You could also have a firepit in the middle of the seating area, making it the ideal space to sit late into the night, or on colder days. Your yard will be the place where your friends and family definitely want to be if you have something like this installed there.
Make It Wildlife Friendly
To really make the most of your backyard redesign, you can ensure that it is the perfect environment for wildlife to live and breed. You don’t have to let your entire yard become a wildflower wilderness, especially if you want to keep things neat and tidy, but you can allocate an area of it to grow wilder than the rest so that small creatures have somewhere to shelter.
By adding bird feeders, bee ‘hotels,’ a pond, and other items that will encourage wildlife, birds, and insects to your yard, you can sit back and enjoy the display that they will put on, and know that you are doing your bit for the environment at the same time.
In this area of your garden, you should work with the nature that is already there, rather than trying to create something that is more artificial. Make sure that where your garden meets a neighboring property or where it is overlooked by other people it is relatively neat, and leave the wildlife area to a less noticeable part of the yard.
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