Patios and hedges

This post was sponsored by garage doors from garaga. All thoughts and opinions are my own.

Now that the weather is starting to improve (notwithstanding yesterday's brief hail storm), I've started thinking about outdoor projects. Aside from the usual raking and spring clean-up, we I had a handful of small projects planned for this year (edging flower beds, expanding the veggie garden, adding a new plant or two, DIY-ing a couple of window boxes, a little painting and possibly replacing our exterior light fixtures). That's until I spotted this picture in the latest issue of Style at Home:

source: Style At Home, May 2013

Don't worry, I'm not going to try growing a palm tree in Nova Scotia.

We always planned to DIY a small patio in our narrow backyard, but we were waiting until we were ready to take on some much bigger plans for the side yard next to our garage (briefly: tearing down a fence, removing the remnants of an old foundation, levelling the yard, planting grass and building a new fence). Those plans are relatively low on our priority list considering the work we still need to do inside, and we didn't want to move ahead with the patio until the new fence was in place (the plan was to extend the fence along the back of our property, giving us some privacy from our neighbour's backyard).

Both my mother and mother-in-law have suggested using plants to gain some privacy for the other, larger side yard (and both have much greener thumbs than I), but for some reason it didn't occur to me that this could also work along the back of our property. Yes, this is a long, likely confusing way of telling you that we're going to DIY a patio and plant a privacy hedge.

Here's my patio inspiration - just picture some lovely green hedges in place of those fences!