Before and after
Bright Frog:
The mother of all patios.

If ever a garden needed the Bright Frog treatment this was it. As you can see from the two pictures below the patio areas were in a shocking state.
We started by looking at the garden very carefully and found that there were many excellent mature shrubs which needed to stay but all the hard landscaping had to go. Removing the existing paving was a mammoth task, over 50 tons of spoil was removed, 150 square meters of garden was excavated, levelled and hard cored.
We split the site into three areas:
A raised patio, 21 square metres in extent. We built a new wood shed up here with a galvanized tin roof. The original inspection cover, the rodding eye and gulleys all needed replacing. Retaining walls for this area were constructed using slate blocks, you can see a picture of this area by clicking the photograph on the right below.
At 30 square metres the middle patio was a pretty straight forward proposition. As with all our paving we used sand impregnated with resin for the pointing up which is, quicker, cleaner and more consistent in terms of colour than mortar. It also saves you a bundle in labour costs!
Finally, we had the issue of a 90 square metres paved area to deal with. As a point of focus in the expanse of stone we placed a pond at below paved level, shown in the photograph above. Once the paving was completed we bought in and painted a 10'x14' summerhouse and built a bike shed.
Total budget for this project was £21,000.00.

You can click the pictures above to see how this garden eventually looked.