In this post I’m going to try to cover the work on the exterior as much as I can. My involvement with our family reno ended when all the interior work was done, as the exterior work was much more physically demanding and the damage my illness did last year meant I just wasn’t cut out for it. Doing my three square metre rockery on my own was enough of an achievement for me!
Because I wasn’t really involved with this part of the project, this post will probably be a bit light on detail, but hopefully it will still be interesting to see how the house came together on the outside.
After the incredibly arduous task of emptying the house contents into numerous skips and boxes destined for charity shops (except for sentimental things of course), the first area we tackled was the outside front. Honestly it was a mess and some parts of it were very overgrown.
This already made such a big difference.
We wanted to clear all this out to open the front right up and make it feel bigger, especially with those conifers dominating the area. This meant we could install a new wooden gate at the entrance and some post and rail fencing along the front boundary. Installing the gate posts was a pretty tough job as not only are they heavy but go three feet below the surface. I think we can safely say they are solid.
Then the fencing started to go up and we got some heavy machinery in to excavate the land.
We defined a gravel area for cars to park, and a front lawn with some freshly laid turf. This had to wait months – the summer of 2022 was an extremely hot and dry summer, so any turf laid then would have died. It wasn’t until September when we were finally able to get it done.
The wooden fence above continues all the way to the back. We went with a fairly low fence to keep the views over the fields that side, which often have horses in them, and beyond.
Out the back, we laid a new patio, which replaced the old one that was literally just bricks.
We decided that the rear garden could also do with some new turf. The border along the rear fence was left as a blank canvas for people to plant their own things.
Some gravel and a gate to add was really all that was left. The shed also received some restorative work.
And that’s that – one finished property ready for a family to live in.
The final blog post in this series will cover each of the rooms of the house having been dressed for the market – a process known as “staging”.
See you soon,
L x
The Norfolk Home Diaries 