**This is a collaborative post

If you’ve read and/or watched my house tour I mentioned that I hadn’t seen our new house until the day we got the keys. I had seen lots of photographs and when we finally came to see our new house it was all pretty much like I expected. The only thing that hadn’t come across on the pictures was just how steep the garden is. It’s really not very safe for the boys to play in at the moment and  we are desperately in need of a garden makeover. We’re not going to be able to do all the work ourselves though and will probably need a landscape gardener and a tree surgeon too.

Being new to the area we don’t know of any local gardeners but there’s a great service called Bidvine which can help you connect with local professionals, or in fact pretty much any kind of service you can imagine – anything from a plumber to a water-ski instructor! Bidvine is free to use as a customer – all you do is say what service you are looking for and your post code, you are then asked a few questions so the professionals have more of an idea exactly what you are looking for, and then you will receive quotes from any professionals who have the skills you need and are available to do the work. You can then choose which, if any, of the pros you want to work with make contact through Bidvine and then you take it from there.

We’ve got some massive trees in our garden that really need cutting way back before we can get on with any of the other work. There’s also an enormous bush/tree thing that Barry has already made a start on removing but we’re going to need to get someone in to remove the main trunk and roots.

The next step is to get some hard landscaping done – so the steep bits will actually become steeper, perhaps with planting on them, and then there will be more flat areas in between. We also want to replace the patio. At the moment it’s really uneven crazy paving – we want to properly level that so we’ve got somewhere to put a table and chairs.

The garden slopes down to a stream at the bottom – it’s prone to flooding so there’s not much we can do with the area in front of it, which is currently covered in shoulder high weeds! Some of our neighbours have got decking at the bottom of their gardens which I think must be on stilts to avoid the water so that’s something we could look at doing too.

So as you can see there’s an awful lot to do to get the garden how we want it, and unfortunately some of the bigger jobs aren’t going to come cheap. That means that we probably won’t be doing any of the major work any time soon, and for now the boys will have to make do with playing on the bit of garden at the side of our house, and a few more trips to the park.

Have you ever had major work done on your garden? Did you get someone in or do the work yourselves? I’d love to hear about your garden makeover in the comments.

**UPDATE! We finally got the work on our garden done three years after I wrote this post – if you want to have a look at the garden now, check out this post.