Andy’s Little Project

We’ve been in our house for nearly three years, and my little dream project – the one that struck me as soon as we saw this place – has finally been realised…

(No image details in this blog – it’s all about the building, not the photography)… This is the top end of our back garden – ‘Andy’s little project’ for the last three years. When we first viewed the house, this top area – we called it our secret garden – was neglected, overgrown with nettles and rubble. You had to fight your way up some rickety wooden steps at the bottom of the lawn, and through a tight gap in two huge laurel bushes to get there. But the reward for fighting your way through was literally breathtaking. We discovered a stunning western-facing level area sitting high above rolling fields which – we later found out – change colour spectacularly throughout the seasons. Breezy, refreshing, and a thoroughly uplifting place to be. To seal the deal, the sun sets directly in the middle of the picture above…we enjoy some of the best sunsets you can imagine while still being land-locked. In fact, as I’ve lived near to the coast through a fair portion of my life, I tend to get a little claustrophobic if I don’t have a decent horizon. This secret garden of ours provides a level of shoulder-room and grand scale of view that I never expected to find living in our little old English town (we live right on the north western edge of Stamford, which itself is right on the borders of five counties – Lincolnshire, Rutland, Cambridgeshire, Northamptonshire and Leicestershire).  

At the end of this blog, I’ll show you what it looked like soon after we started. But below, the workers (in red, Marie’s brother Craig,  and in blue, her father John) have already arrived. The following images show the gradual progress of a family project which took over two years.

First job was to tame the terraced slope at the foot of the garden, give it a bit of structure. Note roped-off area, which is Andy’s anally-retentive attempt to preserve his grass (another little project, it was fairly cabbage-strewn when we moved in).

Once finished, we’d successfully turned three crumbling earth terraces into two firmer shelves – but we had a long way to go:

Above, we haven’t filled in the ends yet, nor have we gravelled the shelves. And spot the obvious (deliberate) flaw – no easy way to get up there.

A year later, and a couple of outstanding friends called Paul (aka Lorryload Paul, a red haired Harrison Ford lookalike) and Michael (about whom more below) had built us some fantastic decking steps, and a back fence, and side fences too. Note our ex-stray cat Lucy to the left. Grass is coming on nicely too:

But we were still only half way there. That sorted the back end of the main garden, but what about the secret garden, and the big view? It remained untouched, and for almost a year we waited until the time felt right to get Paul and Michael back again, to do the second half of the job. Below, the boys are just a couple of days in to what became a superb, fast, and brilliantly-delivered piece of work:

Up on the top, the lovely bit of decking from picture at the start of this blog was taking shape. I’d always envisioned a platform jutting out like a ship’s prow above the overhang, and it was exciting to see it coming to life:

Finally, on June 27 2009, on the first anniversary of our wedding, we invited our families to come and see us at home, to celebrate our anniversary, to christen our new ’secret garden’, to look at the view, and to share a few drinks and a barbeque with us. Below are (from left) Michael, his partner Graham, Tracey (Mark’s wife), Mairi (my stepmum) and my big brother Mark. Michael – whom we now count as a trusted family friend – was the mastermind behind the decking and, along with our other good friend ‘Lorryload Paul’, built something which will provide lasting enjoyment for our family. Michael even built a small scale model to show us what it would look like, before we made the final creative decisions. That bannister, for example, is wider than usual – wide enough to balance a beer can on, for example (or for me, more likely, a mug of tea…). It was a peaceful evening, once the kids had calmed down, and I found that sitting up on the decking as the sun set, chatting to friends, was every bit as peaceful and rewarding as I imagined it would be:

So to finish, here’s the awful reality of our back garden before we began the two-year process of realising the dream:

And here it is this morning:

There’s plenty still to do – those laurel bushes need taming properly, we haven’t yet started to put any real colour into the garden or onto those gravelled shelves, and the rest of the fencing needs doing.  But it’s a relief to have the big stuff done, and I’m not ashamed to admit that I go up there, to my secret garden, often now, to blow away the cobwebs of the day, to watch the clouds skim along, and to reflect on things a little bit. It’s my haven.