Sherry and I decided, influenced of course by numerous TV shows on the subject, to re-design our garden. Now there isn’t anything really wrong with the garden as it is, but in our wisdom we agreed that perhaps some decking would be nice, not the whole garden, just part of it and we can set up a nice seating/bbq area for the summer. Seeing as we already have a big pond in the garden, we thought that maybe we could look into getting a bridge put across the pond to reach the decked area – after all, it’s been done on the TV shows.
I’ve never been a big fan of garden centres, with their funny smell and awful piped music, but Sherry has always loved meandering round them choosing new plants and various other unnecessary things for the garden, however now we have a real project on our hands I was looking forward to going, after all this was proper gardening, in fact more construction than gardening and I was looking forward to seeing what new tools I might need for the job. We had a slight disagreement over which centre we should go to, with Sherry finally agreeing that we would really need to go to a bigger centre that would hopefully have a decking section where we could find out what we could and couldn’t do – I think the clincher was when I pointed out there was no point having lovely decking with a pretty bridge leading to it if no-one could get to the decking as the bridge wouldn’t hold an adults weight.
I’m still not a big fan of garden centres. Somehow they managed to take all the fun out of my new project, making it more gardening than construction – don’t get me wrong there is some heavy work to be done, but it just doesn’t seem as appealing any more. We are going to have to get someone in to do the bridge over the pond – while I could have undertaken it, it seemed very complicated and I just couldn’t face the stress that would creep over me every time someone crossed it “are they going to fall in? Is it going to fall down and leave us stranded on the other side?” those kind of thoughts, we haven’t made a final decision yet, but it wouldn’t cost much more to actually have someone do all the decking, I would just need to do the prep work, which is basically ripping up the garden that is already there and leveling out the ground. If it means I don’t have to go back to a garden centre any time soon I might just take the offer up.