Let me take you back to November 2014 when we bought our 2nd home and before our second child came along. The house it's self had not been lived in for two years and it was in desperate need of modernisation and renovations inside and out. The reason why the house needed such a great amount of working doing to it was that it was previously owned by an old couple who didn't have the time or budget to keep up with the maintenance of the house or garden.

With so much work to do it took us, builders, plumbers, decorators and our family and friends over three months to bring the house up to a state in which we could move in and live in. You name it we had replace or repair it: the kitchen, boiler, radiators, flooring, carpets, plastering, damp proofing, a new bathroom and pipes, new electrics and sockets as well as decorating every single room.

With so much time, care, money and attention going into the house the money and plans we had set aside for our were not longer an options. With our 2nd child born shortly after moving-in as well we found it particularly hard to invest the time and find the extra money to get the garden done quickly. Which meant that we have to spend every weekend and afternoon we could chipping away at the little jobs, tree stumps and weeds. You might remember me blogging about it the kick-off to the garden renovation here. I think the pictures perfectly show you how overgrown the garden was when we first stepped foot in it.

The Jungle

Our first challenge was to cut back and down the overgrown bushes, trees and shrubs left to grow wildly for two years. We achieve this by doing this in stages, starting at the front first and working our way slowly to the back. We invested in a good set of tools and garden equipment from Engelbert Strauss shortly after moving in which really helped us cut, dig and chop our way through the jungle.

As you can imagine I was a bit scared when I found this grenade whilst digging up the garden. pic.twitter.com/VFRYooHA5y

— Yorkshire Dad (@TheYorkshireDad) July 26, 2015

Turfing & Seeding

Once we had cleared the back-out we then had the mammoth task of digging up roots that were littered along the lawn. This was a manual job and took the most man hours over a long period of time. One of the hardest bits of the job was manually leveling the soil!

Being honest i would have loved to pay someone to do it for us, but again we wanted to save money so we got stuck into the back breaking work. It only took us a couple of months to get the lawn prepared for us to put grass seed down. We opted for seeding as it is less expensive and during the colder months, in which sowing isn't ideal, we had to put down seeds two or three times.


Even though we were still working on the majority of the garden we still found the space for fun and play.

Play Area

Once we had the majority of the lawn looking lush it was then on to create a safe and fun play area for the boys. With a 14ft trampoline and a swing/sling set already purchased we wanted to use a material that was both cheap and durable, should the boys fall over we wanted them to have a soft-landing, so opted for bark. Putting down the membrane to kill off and stop any weeds coming through and piled on a hell of a lot of bark.


As you can see from the image below all out efforts paid off and now have our dream garden. With the addition of a log cabin and new shed to top it off!


Thanks for reading and hope you enjoyed the post and maybe even inspired you to get out into the garden this week.