Repairing the Decking and Time in the Garden

On Friday last, OH decided to take a day off work (he works for himself) and start work on repairing the decking outside the back door. As mentioned in a previous post, it had started rotting badly and was pretty dangerous to walk on, so he'd already removed all the rotted wood, in anticipation of repairing it at some point.

Here's a picture of what it looked like before he started:

He began by replacing the joists. Once that was done, he cut the decking planks to size, treating the bottom of them with wood preservative as he put them in place.

Here's what the decking looked like at that stage. It's a totally different colour to the rest, but will weather to a similar colour eventually. It currently just needs more preservative painting onto the top of the decking planks and then they need to be screwed into place, but it's taking shape.

With the advent of the Jubilee weekend, on Thursday after we'd watched the Jubilee fly past on TV, OH carried on with the decking. Whilst he was doing that I decided to plant out my dahlia plants, as they were now getting quite big. I filled the whole bed with them this year.

Here's a picture of them planted out in one of the raised beds:

I can't wait for them to start flowering.

I then tidied the area at the end of the garden and planted out a few more foxgloves to fill some gaps. It felt so good to work in the garden again. I haven't done any gardening for a while and it felt so therapeutic.

Once OH had finished repairing the decking, we could then repair and put back the small greenhouse and generally put everything back in it's normal place. He also cut up the old decking plants to use for firewood next winter. They filled the log shed. 

Later, I trimmed the honeysuckle down the side return and swept through and eventually all was restored back to normal.  It felt so good to get the garden put back together so that we can once again enjoy it over the summer months. 

Here's an after picture of the decking:

Later, we sat outside and had pizza al fresco on the new decking. It was lovely.