Garden Planning : What to do with the front of the house?

It dawned on me earlier this week that we’ve been in our house over a year now and during that time I’ve been lusting daily over ideas on how to renovate our front garden. Its currently a bit of a mud pit, so much so that you can see passers by peering in through the window and shaking their heads in disbelief that someone could actually live here! The previous owner was a little old man who used it as a vegetable patch, meaning it hasn’t really been touched since the house was built in the late 1930’s. Because of that, like so many of the other projects we’ve taken on during the renovation of this house, we’ll be starting this project completely from scratch.

Tackling the challenge link any good home renovator would, I’ve been adding to a Pinterest Board for the past couple of months now, trying to come up with ideas of things we could do. Unfortunately so far I haven’t really found anything that floats my boat. I think the main problem is that I imagine myself living in an elegant Edwardian terrace, with encaustic tiles and beautiful wrought iron railings. However we live in a 1930’s semi which is partly pebble dashed (although that will be rectified eventually), so there aren’t really many elegant options out there!

A few hours of pinning later and I’ve made the decision to keep it simple! We’ll have a wall running between ourselves and the next door neighbour, which will extend along the front of the house, a grey path leading up to the front door and some pretty pots with bay trees standing either side of the porch.

I want to try and keep the lines as straight and as simple as possible to keep everything neat and tidy. I really like the idea of having a little lawn in front of the house, because i think it looks more homely, but because neither Stu nor I are avid gardeners, we’ve been considering the possibility of using fake grass in front of the living room window to try and keep maintenance down to a minimum.

A lot of people seem to be put off by the idea of fake grass, thinking it to look a little artificial, however there are so many options available these days, we’ve found samples that look really great. Some even have little flecks of brown amongst the blades to make them look more realistic.

Another factor which people appear to be wary of is the price. I will admit some of the higher quality do seem to be quite expensive, but after a little more research, there are some options that don’t appear to cost that much more per square meter than a decent quality turf and because we only have a relatively small area to cover, its working out pretty economical. Plus I’d happily pay a little extra now to save on all that mowing, edging and weeding later on. We’re thinking of it as a carpet for the front lawn, a quick brush here and there and it should look great for years to come.

Garden Lust List

My Pinterest board of front garden ideas…

 

 

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