Last year you might remember that we were thinking about putting in a patio. We decided to take your advice and plan the patio well. We were in B&Q costing it and figuring out our timings when we looked across the aisle at the decking.
We just hadn’t considered it before but after a lot of research, planning and costing we decided a deck was definitely the right move for our garden. It’s more cost effective, quicker to build and less effort to take out should we need to.
B&Q, as ever, have a superb video on building a deck which I recommend you watch. We used the guidance from that video to plan our deck. We made the deck 2.4m x 3.6m, 2.4m being the length of on deck board. This gave us enough room for the expanding wooden table we bought which we love!
The whole deck cost us around £200 including all of the fixtures and fittings. We bought our materials on a weekend when there was an offer on decking ahead of a bank holiday. That’s a great saving compared to a patio of the same size not to mention the difference in time to build.
There is every chance Mr Kat could have built it in a day if he had got started early and not had the children rushing around. As it was it took him a day and a half which is not bad going at all. He built it over a bank holiday weekend so by the Monday we were enjoying our first barbecue on the deck.
I can not tell you the difference having an outside dining space has made in the last couple of months. After seven and a half years in this house we really appreciate the value of creating this deck.
Here’s a shot of the deck this morning, slightly different angle to the shot above to hide the fact that the remainder of the wall is a pile of rubble on the ground! All of our garden furniture is on the deck currently because – GRASS! Next post will be all about the return of the lawn I promise.
With the onset of Spring, Project Garden is back in action and while Mr Kat is busy building something (more on that soon!) the children have been planting flowers.
B&Q have brought out a new system for growing bedding plants which eliminates polystyrene, cuts out peat and uses recycled plastics. Wowee guys, full marks for effort there. It’s called easyGrow and it makes use of Teabag Technology to deliver these improvements.
If you can’t see the embedded videos please click through to Housewife Confidential.
While I’m showing videos – how much do you love their new ad campaign? I’ve got the power!
Thank you to everyone who gave me advice about patios in the comments and on Twitter – you made me realise that it’s not a job to do on a whim when you have a spare couple of hours. We shall be planning the patio with more care and I will bring you a round-up of all of the great advice B&Q sent to me as well. I haven’t decided if we’ll do it this Autumn or wait for Spring now – advice on this welcome as always.
We have managed to complete on of our big projects which was to paint the shed. Oh the shed! Do you remember the first time I bemoaned its orangey-ness? I’ll help you out – that wee baby I’m holding is Betsy. Yep, nothing happens fast around here.
My big inspiration for the shed is from The beach huts which line the promenade in Lyme Regis. Their white and pastel combination is a classic and we wanted to turn our shed into something more care free.
I chose a white and blue combination and decided to go with a twist on traditional designs to give us a fresh feel.
To suppress the dreadful orange stain we used an oil-based primer and then an exterior satin wood paint as our top coat. There was a point when it looked like the stain was coming through but thankfully this disappeared as the primer dried. The satin paint went on like a dream and I’m really happy with the colour fidelity. Materials cost us about £50 including brushes and sand paper.
We split the job over two afternoons, first cleaning, sanding and priming the shed then once that was dry applying the top coat. We can only get to two of the shed walls which made it an even quicker job but a rough guide is it took about three hours for each part including all prep.