Inside Out Style HQ Front Garden Makeover

What kind of glamorous things does an image consultant and style blogger do on her weekends? Attend fashion shows .... fancy soirees .... hobnob with the beautiful people?

Not this one!

What I have spent many of my weekends over the past two years doing is a massive garden makeover. Over the past two years, my husband and I have toiled away in our garden giving it a massive facelift and total makeover.

We are lucky to live in a temperate climate, which means no snow, so don't have to worry about everything being buried under a mountain of snow each winter and can design our garden around many evergreens.

Before renovating our house we realised that we'd need to get rid of a lot of overgrown plants to make room for deliveries of wood, bricks and other building supplies.

You may have seen the garden change over the past 3 years from my outfit photos which I mostly take outside my house.

The first thing we did after the renovation was finished was to build a front path to the front door, as before you had to come down the driveway to get to the front door, and it's a slippery slope in the rain.

This took a lot of digging and back-breaking labour as the soil is clay, and the large liquid amber tree that is in the front garden has a lot of roots that were in the way of our new path. You can imagine me hacking away with a pickaxe day after day to dig down to lay the pavers.

The next job was to clear the rest of the garden and flatten it as it sloped down as we are on a slope, and then dig a lot of holes to sink in the fence posts for what I call our secret garden that is in front of our bedroom window.

The design of the garden was partly around the fact that I take my outfit photos out the front most of the time, and so I wanted a bunch of different locations to be able to utilise in them!

And then it was weekend after weekend of planting. Every weekend I'd head down to our local plant nursery, buy a boot load of plants, then come home and plant them and still feel like the garden was very empty.

What a difference a year makes as the plants have grown and the garden is looking lush now!

We added a few fish and a solar pump fountain to circulate the water and keep the mosquitos from breeding in our pond.

We are now the happy maintainers of this gorgeous garden that is really taking shape! I love it in the spring as the weeping cherry trees are in blossom and the leaves are re-appearing on the liquid amber tree.

Now that the front garden is complete, we are working on the side and back gardens and there is still so much to do!