Front garden makeover, giving our house curb appeal!

I don’t think our front garden had ever seen a bee before, but we managed to take it from boring ugly slate, to a beautiful small garden packed with flowers, bees and butterflies! And here is how we did it

Our front garden was really boring when we moved in, our house was beautiful, but there was just no appeal to our garden whatsoever. It was filled with with this purple slate and a couple of pots with dead plants. The black railings hadn’t been painted for decades, it was just tired and really did not represent us at all.

We love gardening, and I always dreamed of having a front garden completely filled with flowers that would make people stop as they passed by. We had two gardens to do, but thought we would start with this smaller front garden, as it was a much smaller project than what our back one was going to be, and with renovating the whole house at the same time, it just made sense. My plan was to remove all of the slate and turn the whole area into a huge flower bed. However, once Nathan started removing the slate, we realised the slate was covering concrete – I was absolutely gutted.

I felt like the garden was getting uglier! All I thought was, we’ll have to gravel it all and add lots of pots, l needed flowers in my garden. As Nathan carried on removing the slate, he realised there was five beds dug cut into the concrete, at that moment I thought, it isn’t ideal, but it is definitely something we could work with, and maybe it’ll help to keep everything tidy too?

We did think about maybe keeping the slate for the back garden or my Mums garden incase we could use it there, this stuff isn’t cheap! but neither garden was ready for any work to be done, one thing we did consider was being able to put it into self storage for a later date, but we didn’t have a van to move it all, and we’d already pushed our cars to the limits carrying things for the home. Once all the slate was gone (top tip, advertise if for free on marketplace to save having to remove it yourself!) we turned all the soil over, adding compost and bone meal as we went along. We then picked out lots of bedding plants and perennials, and decided for our first year we would pick only purple, yellow and white flowers. It’s a great idea to pick a colour scheme if you’re a little unsure of what to pick and where to place them, it can also make it look a lot more organised than what it is! Remember when you first start your flower beds off, the plants will look a little lost, but a month later, and your garden will look completely different as they grow and fill the area. But don’t forget to feed your plants and dead head them too, to keep them blooming right into the autumn

I also repainted the black railings in a gloss black using Hammerite smooth black paint, and decided to paint the tops of the railing with gold, which I thought was a nice touch, as it matches the railings of the church around the corner

This photo was taken a month and a half after we added the flowers to the garden, within days of completing it, we had bees and butterflies, where there was once only slate!

I think we did a great job of the garden, and people have actually stopped to admire it as well, which just fills me with pride. At first glance when you see that concrete under the slate, it is easy to think that this could never be a beautiful garden, but we worked with what we had, and I really think we came out on top.