When you own your own home, you quickly realise that there is a never ending list of things you need to do. These are usual putting your own touches on the house to make it your own and then those jobs that need doing in order to maintain your home, i.e boiler being serviced, carpets been shampooed among other things. Usually what happens is that as soon as you’ve completed one task another one or two in most cases are added to the list, It becomes never ending.
Quite often the list of jobs does not include the outdoor space or if it does it is usually last on the list. This is the case with us and outdoor jobs of course are weather dependent. Even though we still have a number of jobs to do inside this summer we really wanted to make a good start on clearing the gardens in order to start making the small changes we want. However the good old British weather decided not to play ball and meant we weren’t able to make a start. I for one found it really frustrating as I really wanted to make a good start on the gardens. Thankfully over the bank holiday weekend the weather became more stable and the sun started to appear again. So we were able to finally make a start.
We decided to start in the front garden as a lot of weeding and clearing is needed, as well as tidying up our driveway. We’ve known for a while now that we really need to have a new driveway laid as our current one badly damaged and when we have any heavy rain the area right outside our front door becomes a pond very quickly. So for starters we know that we need to put in some sort of drainage to elevate the problem. Plus as you can see from below the drive is uneven and also has a weed problem!
We’ve tried various weed treatments over the years as well but nothing clears them completely. Cosmetically I find the appearance of our driveway annoys me! it looks so untidy and unkempt next to the lovely driveways our neighbours. Even dad of 3 agrees we need to do something about it but what is the question. A couple of weeks ago we had a company knock on the door asking if we would like our driveway done as they were working in the area. For the record I hate this kind of doorstep selling however I used the opportunity to look at the options available, tarmac, resin bound paving, paving slabs, decorative paving. I was quite surprised how many options there actually were. One of our neighbour’s has decorative paving on her drive and I have to say I quite like the look of it and apart from weeding occasionally it doe not require much maintenance. Our other neighbours have tarmac but theirs look a lot tidier than ours.
One thing for sure is that the first job for us will be to sort out the drainage and then we can we need to work out which sort of driveway surface will be the most cost effective and easy to maintain. Who knew choosing a driveway was so difficult! Do you have a preferred kind of driveway surface?
Disclaimer: this is a collaborative post however the content is 100% my own.