Making a Start on the Garden Renovations

On Saturday afternoon last, it was lovely and sunny, so OH and I took the opportunity, to get out into the garden and start work on our planned garden renovations. Here's a recent picture of the garden before we started work:

There is a now a new fence down one side of the garden, put up by our neighbour with OH's help.  As mentioned in a previous post, we need to replace our fences around the other two sides of the garden, as the existing ones were in very poor condition. Before we could do that, OH needed to empty and take down the old shed, as we have plans to replace it. 

It's always surprising how much junk you tend to hang onto when you've got a shed. We had quite a lot, much of which never gets used. 

Once OH had taken everything out, I had a look through the contents, in order to decide what to keep and what to let go of. We had some camping equipment.  Not a lot, just a tent, a camping cooker and a few pans and plastic plates, etc. We decided to keep all of this, as we may use it in the future. I washed it all and packed it away in some boxes, as we're going to store that in OH's office until we get a new shed.

I also sorted through some garden tools and transferred a few useful things into the greenhouse and some others into the little shed, that we are keeping for the time being. It doesn't fit much in, but it should keep some things dry until the new shed is built. Much of the rest was probably going to be taken to the tip or be donated.

OH, meanwhile, proceeded to remove the fence panels. Luckily, all of our adjoining neighbours (there are three of them) on the remaining two sides of the garden, had their own fences in situ, so this made it possible to remove our fence panels before putting up new ones. Whilst he did this, I began cutting up the vegetation that was dislodged by removing the fences. 

There were climbers along the bottom fence, which took a while to chop up. We will be removing these completely, as they are quite invasive and don't fit in with our plans, as they will become difficult to control in the future. They have been lovely to have there and have provided a lovely backdrop over the years, but more recently, they've become a bit of a problem, as they tend to multiply and smother anything they come into contact with.

Here's a photo of the garden with all the fence panels taken down:  

We almost don't even need to put our own fences up, but it will give ourselves and our neighbours much more privacy and provide a more cohesive look.

As you can see from the above photographs, by the time we'd finished there was a lot of debris to remove and take to the tip. OH will be hiring a van to do this, hopefully some time this week. Once that has been done, there will be room to move once again and to progress to the next job, which will involve a lot of pruning to get some of our trees under control. I know it's probably not the best time of year to do this, but it needs to be done. Once it is done, OH can start to rebuild the fences and we can prepare the bottom of the garden for a new shed/garden room.

I'll keep posting as work progresses. It's very exciting, I can't wait to make more progress.