Work in Progress - Our Garden and Dining Room

This months' Work in Progress is a bit of a mammoth project, and has been 'in progress' since we moved into this house nearly 2 years ago. We are lucky enough to have a large open plan kitchen and dining room with big glass doors into the garden - this room was the clincher for me when we were viewing the house. When the sun shines the space looks fantastic and it's such a wonderful room to spend time in (which is good as we all often hang out here!)

Photo credit: Zoopla

However, things are rarely perfect and although the developer who updated the house did put this extension in he also ripped out the garden too. I have seen old property details and there was a lovely mature garden at the rear bursting with plants. Unfortunately we were left with a very dull rectangular garden with poorly laid turf, a dominating new fence, a small patio and no plants whatsoever!

Photo credit: Zoopla

Last year I made a start on the planting and even grew some tomatoes & runner beans but there is still a lot to do. While the plants take their time to establish I thought I could at least inject a bit of colour myself. The fences provide a backdrop to all the plants so I decided to paint them with Cuprinol 'Wild Thyme' from the Garden Shades range - it's actually more teal than grey as it looks in the photos below. There are so many shades in the DIY shop these days that it's really easy to liven up your fences (& protect them at the same time.)

I've also mentioned before that our dining room is a bit of a white cube. Great as a blank canvas but it just doesn't feel homely enough to me. I want to use some bright colour in here and I thought it would make sense if I used similar colours in the garden and the dining room; connecting inside and outside.

I bought this poster from a flea market years ago and it now hangs near the patio doors so using this as a starting point I echoed the pink to give a new lease of life to our old garden bench and table (Sweet Sundae from Cuprinol)

 

I got carried away with 'finishing' this little corner of the patio so stayed up late on Sunday night to sew up a cushion pad for the bench (I know I can't be the only one who does this?!) Its made using Cloud 9 Geocentric Circles in Teal which is an organic canvas fabric (from my stash) and simply quilted using 2 layers of left over batting. It's hardwearing and comfy but still easy to roll up small for storage when not in use, and can be washed too. I think I'm going to make some more of these for our hallway bench indoors - so much quicker than a boxed cushion cover. I made new envelope cushion covers using more fabric from the stash and the finishing touch was to hang the white ball tea-light holders (from Habitat about 6 years ago) on the fence.

There's still lots to do - paint the coloured feature wall in the dining room, finally get round to putting the fronts on the shelves I made (about a 18 months ago!), tend the garden and find a solution to the clothes horse that seems to be permanently up by the back doors! But we're getting there... Hopefully I'll be able to post some pictures of the finished dining room and garden soon.

What projects have you got on the go this month? I'd love to see so please leave a link in the comments below or you can tweet me a picture @thisiswiss, and we can encourage each other to finish them!