Browse Forums Landscape & Garden Design 1 Aug 13, 2015 1:25 pm Hi all I'm looking for some advice/ideas/feedback from those which much more experience than I on a redesign we're doing on our very small backyard. We've been complaining for ages how our townhouse is lovely - except for the tiny backyard, and we've finally decided to bite the bullet and re-landscape it to try and get the most out of the limited space. Ive come up with the design attached, and am looking mainly for some comments around the general scale of it - am I trying to jam too much into too small of a space? I have some rough materials and colours in mind - we have an existing merbu deck which is larger than the new design, so I plan on modifying this and building the built-in seating and garden bed/planters out of this as well. For the raised garden bed down the long side, I am thinking one of the nicely textured concrete sleeper retaining walls, with the top and front of the steelwork clad in merbu. The "sand' area would essentially be a sand pit for the kids (with a blackboard mounted on the back face of the deck/seating), but we thought that having some feature areas of sand/pebbles/rocks/larger rocks would give a nice contrast of colours and textures. We have basic paling fences on the 2 long sides, which we're hoping to screen almost completely with plantings - perhaps bamboo on the side against the lawn as I'm thinking it would have the narrowest footprint. On the garden bed side we could use a more traditional hedging. Hopefully my ramblings have made some sort of basic sense - I'm much more of a "doer" than a "designer"; give me some plans and I'm pretty confident of being able to build anything, I just need to sort out the plans first! The drawing is to scale (done in visio), I just threw on a couple of dimensions to give some idea of the size and scale - ie: not very big! Thanks heaps Baz https://imagizer.imageshack.us/v2/748x6 ... WquWjy.jpg Re: Feedback/ideas on small backyard design 2Aug 13, 2015 2:40 pm I think the space would look bigger, and be more usable for kids if you took out the rocks and put the lawn across that area as well. Or expanding out the lawn to almost be a rectangle, and leaving some of rocks 1 and rocks 2 up in the corner may work as well. Re: Feedback/ideas on small backyard design 3Aug 13, 2015 3:40 pm Thanks John, good suggestion. Now that Ive messed around a little bit, I like both of these alternate options... Like ⋅ Add a comment ⋅ Pin to Ideaboard ⋅ https://imagizer.imageshack.us/v2/748x6 ... lkGmrn.jpg Like ⋅ Add a comment ⋅ Pin to Ideaboard ⋅ https://imagizer.imageshack.us/v2/748x6 ... cakyBM.jpg Hi Brainstrust, I had a go at creating my own irrigation plan, keen to get some feedback. It will be run from one 750-800W pump, off 2* 5000L rain tanks. Each zone… 0 22766 DIY, Home Maintenance & Repair That laser level looks lovely! We bought one for less than a quarter of that price off eBay. It worked really well for us and it's still going now, five years later. After… 1 16713 It's possible but a soak well is usually much larger. Your 'soak well' only holds 424 litres when full. What is your soil type? Soak wells need sandy soils. 10 9012 |