Here comes the fence

When we chose this house, the garden wasn't much of a consideration.  It had been high on our tick list fifteen months before when we started looking - must be south or west facing must be fairly level must be able to be changed by me because it was unlikely I'd like what someone else had done!!  As the search went on (more off than on as it happens) the garden seemed to slither out of view.

We ended up with a North facing garden, on clay and a slight slope.  However, since putting our stamp on it we are so happy we didn't choose one of our neighbours houses.  Their gardens are on such slopes it will take some clever thinking and/or a lot of money to make them really usable.

A factor with new build too is that generally you only get post and rail fencing to demarcate the boundaries and you are left with the huge expense of getting fences in.  Again, as luck would have it, we had a wall and fence on our right and again across the bottom of the garden so we had a good start.  

The fences here are vertical open board fencing which is great for allowing wind to pass through without damage to the fence and offers less frost damage to your plants than a solid fence.  The downside is a lack of privacy.  They are generally double-sided and it would seem the etiquette requires the person who has the wrong side of the fence facing them to complete that work.  So, we needed to clad the back side of the right hand wall/fence to make it double sided; we can leave the bottom fence as is, as the good side is facing us, and build a new fence along the left boundary - with the good side facing us again.

26th April and the fencing was done.  At the front of the house we had the small enclosure fence linking house to fence on the right hand side and a nice tall gate made and put in on the left giving us and future gardener and window cleaner access to the back of the house.  Feels good to have marked out our domain.