Winter came and went, and it was cold so I didn't really do much other than maintenance outside. Top up the bird feeders, dead-head and generally tidy up anything that had gone over, and that was about it. Winter eventually turned into spring, and that's when I started to think about starting the next bits in and around the garden. The wind was pretty bad and managed to destroy a few fence panels, but that wasn't a huge job to sort out.
I'd planned to add in a pergola structure in my original plan, so I started to order a few things (like the gymnastics bar for my daughter that would go with it) and started drawing up a few ideas for what I was going to do next. I'd figured out what I wanted to build, and was thinking about how I was going to bed in the posts when the whole world went to hell in a handbasket because of a coronavirus.
I couldn't order in the timber I needed as every supplier in the area was locked down, and even when they were allowed to re-open they didn't sell to domestic buyers any more. I hunted further afield, but online orders were sporadic and massively delayed when they were available, and in order to get what I was after I would have had to order in from multiple suppliers and hope for the best. That didn't inspire confidence. Lockdown meant I couldn't even go out and buy the things I wanted, and because everyone else was also on lockdown and looking to do DIY projects at the same time it became pretty much impossible to do anything that involved timber at all. Throw brexit-related shortages on top of that and it was a struggle to get hold of a lot of stuff.
Then, it didn't matter at all because I was put on furlough and paying the mortgage and the bills became a far larger worry. That didn't leave a lot of money for anything, let alone to spend on the garden.
I was evidently going to have to get creative and find ways of making things happen with little to no supplies and on a tiny budget. Luckily, I've always been a cheapskate so I figured the main problem was likely to be sourcing supplies. In a stroke of luck, my uncle had recently torn up his old patio and wanted to get rid of a lot of flags and offered them to me, so I had a bunch of flags at the side of the house that needed the mortar chipping off but didn't cost me a penny. I also had some spare timber left from the last batch of edging I'd done around the gravel and the existing flags, and a bunch of leftover stones from elsewhere in the garden.
The obvious and simple place to start was to extend the border down the side of the pond in line with the gravel and I generally tidied up that area while I was there to make it more presentable. This included de-turfing and embedding some of the flags into the turf to make a little path:
Extending the pond bed was a simple option and I had spare edging timber, so that was a no-brainer
A local plant supplier also cleverly started a lockdown plant delivery service, so when I had a little bit of spare cash I ordered a few things from them. These went initially in the bed that was reduced in size last year into the bed by the pond as well.
The new plants went into the bed I'd shrunk down last year
This kept me busy for a little while, and not long after both my uncle and a neighbour of my dad's re-turfed their lawns and had extra turf left over. My dad nabbed it for me, and I used it to patch some areas of the lawn that were badly damaged.
I'd also kept on chipping away at the mortar on the flags until I had enough, and once I had enough I used them to lay out an irregular pattern on top of the gravel to put the table and chairs on:
It looks very garden-like with the turf patched and the flags laid on the gravel (Original Size Image)
I didn't even mortar the flags under the table - those are simply lying on top of the gravel because at that particular point in time I couldn't get hold of any mortar thanks to the stupid pandemic. They're actually still like that several years on because they've not budged in all that time and it seems somewhat churlish to pick them all up to put them right back down again when they're doing a perfectly fine job.
Because of lockdown I only had limited time available outside, and what time I did have was mostly spent outside in the garden relaxing in the glorious sunshine. The bulk of our efforts were directed under the auspices of my wife who declared that with the two of us being off work at the same time and under a restricted budget, our best use of that time was to attack the interior of the house. This was helped massively when DIY shops were allowed to open, so we could at least buy paint to go on the walls and filler to patch them, and that wasn't going to cost very much to do at all.
This short but intense period of activity saw us strip the wallpaper (including the stuff on the ceilings and coving in every room) out of three bedrooms, the cloakroom, and the kitchen, rip out built-in wardrobes in two of those bedrooms, fill and sand down all of them, and paint the walls in every single one of them. We even painted the wall tiles with a tile paint in the kitchen and cloakroom while we were at it. On top of that, we still managed to home-school two children and keep them entertained during lockdown, somehow.
We removed all of the wall units in the kitchen as we had the idea to replace them with open shelving to at least change the look a little bit given we couldn't really do anything about the base units at that point in time. Obviously, it was still a struggle to get hold of timber, but I luckily found a local supplier who could provide scaffold boards and I was able to order the brackets and other hardware online. Being me, I also over-ordered on the boards because the initial idea of three shelves per wall looked far too busy, so I had some spare scaffold boards left over to play with when I was done.
However, all of this was such a monumental effort that by the end of it all we were struggling for both energy and motivation. It was almost a relief to go back to work, although an ongoing salary cut was an additional stress that I didn't want. It obviously meant less money available to spend on the garden and on the house, but as there was no time available to do it anyway as we were both back working and nowhere was open to be able to spend any of it we were able to get by well enough.
And at least we were were able to go outside and enjoy the garden in the glorious weather that lockdown brought us, and watch the wildlife start to proliferate in there.
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