KERB APPEAL

Kerb appeal, give generously! Your donations will fund a new raised border, driveway landscaping and a plant shopping spree unlike the UK’s foreign aid budget which is probably squandered on white elephant vanity projects or airports that’ll see little use on islands that are too windy to fly from.

Frontage, like a pair of big knockers, is the first thing people notice when they visit your house so it doesn’t do to have saggy cleavage. Front doors need to look attractive, garden plants perky and unlike my once white booby holders, everything needs to look clean and bright. Pristine is the word that comes to mind which cannot be said for my grey-tinged double D’s.

There's only room for 1 car on the drive

The front garden is being given a makeover not so much to improve its aesthetic kerb appeal but to save us the £39 per year fee for a permit to park outside our own front door.

Much of the structure to create more off-road parking already exists, buried under an overgrown hedge, a tatty rockery and an inconveniently positioned conifer. All we have to do is chop it all down, dig it all up, pull down the cracked, unsafe wall and rob a bank – what could be easier?

Making best use of the things that you find

The cost of aggregates, cement which is now harder to find than unicorns and other landscaping materials has gone through the roof thanks to Covid and Brexit making home improvements not the economical projects they once were. Still there is still money to be saved if you put the time and effort into these things but just in case, I have been covertly scouting the perimeter of the local Lloyds bank branch.

Removing the front hedge plants has magically added almost a metre to the proposed parking area.

Digging out mature hedges is not easy

The inconveniently placed conifer has been chopped down and the large rockery stones recycled into a path border to the lifeboat shed in the back garden.

More space now that conifer & hedge have gone

Recycled rockery stones into path border

A few tugs at the unsafe wall resulted in most of the blocks coming free quite easily. These have been cleaned of all mortar to recycle into a raised corner flower bed.

Badly cracked wall due to tree roots

So, our cunning plan is to lower the soil level around the existing concrete hardstanding and to use plastic garden grids filled with either limestone chippings or soil alongside it in order to enlarge the size of the parking space.

Aco groundguard grids to keep chippings neat

Extending the existing block paving would be very expensive thus Aco groundguard grids are a cheaper and quicker way forward. Flexible enough to be cut down and linked together plus strong enough once filled to take the weight of a car. Fortunately for us, I can buy these from work thus saving us a few pennies.