Starting from Scratch - Day0

About two years ago the urge grabbed me -the garden was a mess! Overlooked, no plants to speak of bar a few small pot plants here & there, no wildlife, untidy gravel areas and a lawn with a well worn track worked into it by our dog endlessly circling not to mention the abundance of weeds - things had to change but to what?

A Blank Canvas

The picture above shows the garden before I started, frustratingly it appears I didn't take any pictures so a snowscape is the best I have complete with hasty snowman. As you can see it's not a particularly large garden & the backend slopes steeply downwards but it's a reasonable size compared to some of the places I've lived.

First things first - I needed a design, I wanted to be able to enjoy the garden - not too overlooked, encourage wildlife (Crows, Magpies & Seagulls were all I'd seen to date) & have areas for flowers, salad & veg,  fed up with the gravel (I have soft feet in the summer!) I thought decking the way to go surrounded by raised beds; but how much wood to order, how would the decking look? where would plants & flowers go? I have an artistic & technical nature so for me the obvious answer was to find some software to allow me to create and play with models of the garden to be. After much Googling of the web (and numerous diversions as I disappeared down rabbit holes of 'ooh - that link looks interesting...) I found a superb freeware program called 'Sweet Home 3D' that met my needs and especially the price, if you're interested take a look at www.sweethome3d.com; it took me a couple of hours to get to grips with & then I was away - I ended up building a complete model of the house not just the garden!

Initial design courtesy of Sweet Home 3D

After much fiddling and experimentation I finally decided on the design above, Note - Sweet Home 3D is capable of much better rendering and there are some truly fantastic examples on their website however this worked for me and allowed me to calculate exactly how much timber & decking I was going to need. Next step was to source the timber as cheaply as I could, as luck would have it B&Q announced a sale with decking boards at just over £4 each, with help from a local 'man with a van' the timber was purchased and delivered to the garden just in time for the long Easter Weekend - next step: let construction begin!