Garden furniture

To go with our new decking and flowers, we bought some garden furniture so we can fully enjoy these sunny days.

Garden furniture

It’s a six-person set, but to squeeze six people round it on the decking, even sideways, would involve someone being very squashed next to the fence and someone at the other end of the table teetering on the edge of falling into the grass.  That’s why we’ve decided to have it as a large four-seater, and kept the other two chairs for the patio area by the French doors.

Two chairs

We just need a table to go with them – we’ve kept the old one for now but it’s kind of had its day.  You may also notice some odd slabs in this picture, this is because Barry’s taken the slabs across to make the patio area bigger, but now they’re a bit obvious.  They’ll weather (I’m reliably being told by Barry, who’s reading over my shoulder)!

Garden furniture 1

The furniture’s a set called Sienna from Homebase, black metal with a purple parasol (hence the purple flowers).  We haven’t actually had the parasol up yet, what with the sun being so fickle, but I can assure you, it does look pretty good – we saw it in store.

Check out the photo here for our fabulous dual coloured fence (it hasn’t been finished yet).

Decking day deux

Decking 6We’re pretty much done with the decking already!  The men started early, about 7.30, and started putting the decking boards onto the frame they’d built the day before.  They also built the path back up so we didn’t fall into a deep, dark hole taking the bin out.  That would have been inconvenient.

The skip that was supposed to arrive between 10am and 12pm came at around 5pm after the gents had already gone home, so they’re coming back on Saturday morning to get rid of the mound of dirt in the back garden.  I did try to shame the man delivering the skip but he just asked us for money.  We didn’t give him it.

Decking 7The landscape guys also built a raised flowerbed at the bottom of the garden, as per Barry’s masterplan, which looks great; we just need to decide what to put in it.

After the mud has been cleared away, we need to get some grass seed stat and dig up those nasty weeds that blight our grass.

Decking 8

We’re also planning on getting a new shed, putting a step in between the two levels for Scarlett’s tiny legs and covering the manhole cover in some way.  Then we would like to put up higher fence panels next to the decking, as we can currently see right over into next door’s garden now, and that’s just not polite.  Then we’re going to stain the decking and fence so everything matches.  I quite like the idea of it being a dark stain, but we’ll have to go shopping and see.

Then we need some nice garden furniture and Barry’s loving the idea of a fire pit.

After that (but way in the future), I’d like to change the paving slabs we have for nice ones instead of the utilitarian grey concrete ones that the house builders put in.  We’ll need almost 40, so it won’t be cheap!

I’ll put up some more photos once the mud mound has disappeared, but I’m really happy with this result!  Just hope we get a summer to go with it…

So, what do you think?  Quick poll: have you ever painted one side of your fence (and not the neighbour’s side)?