What would you do with this garden?

Abbafan1972

I love it as it is.  I would be inclined to spruce up the fence panels on the left (are they yours?), by painting them a nice colour, if you can get away with not replacing them.   

SMcGill

If you’re doing this for buyers do nothing more than obscure the mesh fencing at the end and maybe pollard the large tree.

If you’re doing this for yourself, do anything that takes your fancy.

Skiddaw1

I agree about the fencing. Might well be worth getting out the wood-stain (I'd go for a sea-green/blue). The wire mesh could easily be obscured with some willow trellis or similar. I woudn't go so far as to pollard any of the trees but I'd get them professionally pruned before you go on the market. Other than that, leave it as a blank canvas is my advice.

thriftytracey

We are sprucing up our house ready for the market in April.  Really just cosmetic stuff, touching up painted walls, filling in cracks, we are going to get all the UPVC cleaned and I am going to pressure wash the patios.  We are looking for a bungalow with smaller garden as we are 60+ and that garden looks good to me, particularly as it is not overlooked.  A really nice patio and lovely lawn with trees, a perfect blank canvas.  

BTW - I love the way posters are describing buying a bungalow as downsizing!  From looking on RM bungalows are not much cheaper than our large detached house with quite a large garden.

Slinky

We painted our old fences Cuprinol muted clay which is a lovely silvery colour.  Makes the garden seem a lot lighter and we have had sun being reflected from the fences into the house which is useful, as we have no south facing windows (our garden is an odd shape so the fences are at an angle to the house which help the reflection of light).

kdotdotdotdot

Weathergirl_76 said:

For the lighting, maybe some warm coloured spotlights against the trees would look good. I also remember they used to add recessed spotlights into decking and patios a lot, or plant bamboo in borders with spotlights behind them.  Some would be on timers or remotes. The effects were amazing. 

A warning about bamboo - my neighbour had bamboo along the fence line and that stuff can spread like wildfire and is really hard to get rid of.  So far I've dug up around 100m of roots from my garden and still need to find a landscaper to dig up further and deal with it.  It's a beautiful plant, but beware.  Bamboo comes in two types: clumping and spreading.  Clumping seems to be ok, but I honestly believe the spreading type should be illegal in this country.  

Jeepers_Creepers

GDB2222 said:

You would take a sledgehammer to someone else’s kitchen! And, can I just check, do  you carry a sledgehammer with you at all times, or just when viewing houses? You could get quite a reputation locally, before you get locked away.

Yup - at all times. And it's silver. And my name is Maxwell.

So, take care to look behind you... :-)

GDB2222

McCartney said in 1994 that it symbolizes the failures of life:

"Maxwell's Silver Hammer" is my analogy for when something goes wrong out of the blue, as it so often does, as I was beginning to find out at that time in my life. I wanted something symbolic of that, so to me it was some fictitious character called Maxwell with a silver hammer. I don't know why it was silver, it just sounded better than Maxwell's hammer. It was needed for scanning. We still use that expression now when something unexpected happens."

I think that someone taking a sledgehammer to my new kitchen would, indeed, be something unexpected happening. 

Mahsroh

kdotdotdotdot said:

Weathergirl_76 said:

For the lighting, maybe some warm coloured spotlights against the trees would look good. I also remember they used to add recessed spotlights into decking and patios a lot, or plant bamboo in borders with spotlights behind them.  Some would be on timers or remotes. The effects were amazing. 

A warning about bamboo - my neighbour had bamboo along the fence line and that stuff can spread like wildfire and is really hard to get rid of.  So far I've dug up around 100m of roots from my garden and still need to find a landscaper to dig up further and deal with it.  It's a beautiful plant, but beware.  Bamboo comes in two types: clumping and spreading.  Clumping seems to be ok, but I honestly believe the spreading type should be illegal in this country.  

THIS!! A million times this.

We have it in the garden at our rented house. We asked the Letting agent / LL if we could remove it (at our own cost) which got rejected. It's really difficult to maintain and as you say, spreads like wildfire, to the extent that it also keeps springing up on our neighbours property, through the patio and such like. 

We explained the situation to the neighbour and explained our predicament and suggested they complain directly to the LL / Agent (we previously explained the issue to the LA before our request was turned down) but they're reluctant because they don't want to cause an argument / get into a dispute. 

GDB2222

We have friends who grow horseradish in a bucket. The roots spread, but the bucket keeps it contained. The bucket is buried, by the way.

Horseradish is quite a small plant. Could you do the same with bamboo, although you would need a larger container?