Stepping outside and the chapter we’ve been waiting for – the garden is part of the renovation, we just hadn’t had the headspace to think about it until now

Committed home renovators David and Andrew Harrison-Colley (better known on Instagram as The Home Boys) are part of Ideal Home's new Open House contributors, sharing their thoughts on making a home together and living through the tricky parts. See the rest of their articles here.

We came back from holiday a couple of weeks ago to a forecast that genuinely lifted our spirits – another potential heatwave on the way, the kind of weather that gets you sketching plans on the back of an envelope and ordering things from the timber merchant before you’ve even unpacked the suitcases.

After years of pouring our attention inwards – knocking down walls, building extensions, laying floors, tiling, painting – it’s a strange and lovely thing to suddenly find ourselves looking outwards instead.

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The garden, which has spent the last three years as a combination of building site, storage area and unofficial overflow space for whatever wouldn’t fit inside the house, is finally getting our attention. Properly. Not as an afterthought.

And we’ve realised something we probably should have admitted sooner: the outside is part of the renovation too. It always was. We just hadn’t had the headspace to think about it until now.

The shift in energy

There’s a particular feeling that arrives when you stop renovating in dust and start renovating in sunshine. The work itself doesn’t get easier – if anything, lugging bricks across a lawn in 28 degrees is a different kind of brutal – but the mood shifts entirely.

You can leave the doors open. You can hear the birds rather than the dust extractor. You can stop for a cup of coffee on the grass instead of perched on an upturned bucket in a half-finished room. You can actually see what you’re working on, in proper light, with no plaster haze in the air.

And there’s something deeply satisfying about projects you can stand back from at the end of the day and see, immediately, how far you’ve come. So many of our indoor jobs have been slow and incremental – the kind where you spend a whole weekend on one corner of a room and the difference is only really visible to you.

Outdoor work tends to be the opposite. A retaining wall starts as a trench and ends, a few weekends later, as a wall. A patch of scrappy lawn gets edged in brick and suddenly looks intentional. The transformations feel more honest somehow.

What we’ve got planned

There’s quite a list, if we’re honest. More than we’ll get through in one summer, almost certainly. But the rough shape of it goes something like this.

First, the lawn. It’s currently a slightly apologetic shape – uneven edges, no real definition, mowed but never really designed. We want to reshape it properly and edge it with reclaimed bricks set flush into the grass, so the mower can run straight over the top. A small detail that we think will completely change the feel of the back garden.

Second, the retaining wall we started three years ago and never finished. It’s been sitting there ever since – half-built, slightly accusatory, made from the breeze blocks we used as the structural base and waiting for the brick facing we always promised it. The bricks for it have been waiting too. Which brings us to the next bit.

Third, the bricks themselves. When we took down the old carpenter’s workshop to make way for the extension three years ago, we made a decision that felt slightly mad at the time and feels even madder now: we cleaned every single brick by hand. Thousands of them. Sat in the garden chipping old mortar off with bolster chisels, stacking them in neat piles, telling ourselves we’d use them for something one day. That day is finally arriving. They’ll go into the retaining wall, the lawn edging, and a new set of brick-and-sleeper steps to tie it all together.

And fourth, the bigger ambition: a new patio area at the west-facing side of the house, perfectly positioned for the evening sun. The only catch is that the spot we want to put it is currently occupied by what’s left of the original outside toilet – a small brick outbuilding that’s been quietly clinging on for decades, doing nothing in particular and getting in the way of our patio plans.

So before we can start the nice part, we’ve got another demolition on our hands. Which feels oddly fitting, given that’s how this whole renovation started in the first place.

Why this matters more than we expected

For a long time, we treated the garden as something we’d “get to eventually”. It was always next on the list, but the list kept growing and the garden kept slipping. Living in the house through the build meant the indoor jobs were the loudest – they were the ones disrupting our day-to-day, the ones we couldn’t ignore.

But here’s what we’ve realised this summer: the garden is the bit you see every single time you look out of a window. Every cup of coffee at the kitchen island, every evening on the sofa with the doors slid open, every morning standing barefoot at the back of the house with a brew – it’s all framed by the outside. And no amount of beautifully finished interior really lands if the view out of it is a half-finished retaining wall and a confused lawn.

It’s also where the house meets the rest of life – guests arriving at the front, summer evenings at the back, the dog (maybe, one day) tearing around the lawn, friends crammed onto whatever seating we can rustle up. The garden isn’t a bonus. It’s where some of the best bits actually happen.

Pacing ourselves (or trying to)

We’ve learned enough by now to know we can’t do it all at once. Three years of renovating has taught us that the moment you try to take on every project simultaneously, everything stalls. So the plan is to chip away at the outdoor list the way we’ve chipped away at the indoor one: one defined project at a time, finished properly, before moving onto the next.

The bricks come first, because the materials are already on site (and have been for three years, patiently waiting). The lawn shaping follows naturally – it uses the same bricks and the same skills, and we can do it without needing anything to dry, set or cure between weekends.

The patio is the bigger commitment, and the demolition of the old outside toilet will be its own little chapter – equal parts satisfying and dusty, as demolitions tend to be.

We might not get all of it done before the weather turns. Some of it might roll into next spring. That’s fine. The garden, like the house, doesn’t need to be finished in a single push to start feeling better.

Working with what’s already there

One thing we’re trying to resist is the urge to start from scratch. There’s some established planting we love – the wisteria climbing the front of the house, the roses at the side, the laurel that gives us privacy from neighbours – and we don’t want to lose any of it in the pursuit of a tidier garden.

The same principle that’s shaped the inside of the house applies just as much out here: work with what’s already good, edit gently, and add slowly.

The reclaimed bricks help with that enormously. Because they’re old, slightly weathered, varied in tone, they don’t feel like new additions. They feel like they’ve always been there. Which, in a way, they have – they were here before the carpenter’s workshop came down, and they’ll be here long after we’ve stopped renovating. That’s a kind of continuity we really like.

Onto the next thing

So that’s where we are. Back from holiday, slightly tanned, slightly anxious about the to-do list, but more excited than we’ve been about any phase of this renovation in a while. The weather’s on our side. The materials are already in the garden. The vision, more or less, is clear.

Over the next few articles we’ll share the projects properly – the bricks that waited three years and are finally getting their moment, the new face of the cottage now that the front has been re-rendered and the porch is in, and (eventually) the patio that we have to demolish a Victorian toilet to build.

We’ve spent a long time pouring everything we have into the inside of this house. It feels good, finally, to step outside.