Why you Should Create a Garden Before Renovating the House

My argument for doing things the wrong way round, and how to protect it when the build starts.

Hello new view from the living room!

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If you read any guide to building and renovating it will tell you to design and plant your garden after you’ve finished with the house. In fact, most gardening manuals would say the same thing. It makes perfect sense. Remodeling a home is a very messy business, and builders are completely plant blind, they won’t even see your prized hydrangeas, let alone care that they’ve been trampled to death. So why then have I done the exact opposite for all ten of our renovations over the last 28 years?

There will be a hell of a lot of naysayers on this topic, particularly on Instagram (looking forward to that). Have I lost my mind? Why would you spend all that money on plants just to have them killed off by a tradesman with clumsy boots and a digger for carnage?

Well, for most homes there are ways to deal with those issues, but for me it’s also about being an impatient gardener, wanting things to look pretty, and saving my sanity all at the same time.

We’re near the end of the exterior works on our barn, and honestly, apart from one or two minor incidents, the garden has come away unscathed. But, you’ve got to rule with an iron fist and set your boundaries. Let me explain.

The scaffold is coming down, yay!

Creating a garden before doing renovation work is all in the planning. It’s also about being realistic as to how much you can expect from your builder once you’ve had ‘the chat’. By that I mean the sit down heart to heart you’re going to have with Bob telling him that if he ruins your garden hell fire will rain down on him for all eternity. You think I’m joking, I’m not. It’s important to drill in to whoever is responsible that protecting the garden matters, maybe not to them, but most definitely to the person paying out wads of cash.

The buffer zone

But first, let’s discuss how much of the garden you can plant before a build, and where to draw the line. In every home and garden redesign I’ve done I’ve made sure that there was a generous perimeter fence, even if it’s imaginary, between the house and the garden I created. That means having a buffer zone where builders can drop scaffolding collars without breaking your precious terracotta pots, where they can churn up the soil and rampage through overgrowth to their hearts content.

For the barn I left a third of the garden closest to the house empty. Anything that I prized, like the roses I inherited from a previous garden lover, I dug up and either transplanted elsewhere, or put in a pot. We then used tall planters as a wall between the finished garden and the buffer zone, but I have been known to use actual real life fencing before, so don’t be afraid of that. The more obvious the barrier the better. You are literally creating a barricade, it’s Les Miserables Mark II, and you’re fighting for your plants.

In a previous home in Surrey, we build the main structure of the garden three years before we received planning permission to rebuild the house. Life is way too short to be waiting all that time doing nothing, not enjoying your outside space. In that time it went from a mountainous jungle to a mature hanging gardens. You can read my three-parter about that here, here, and here.

The garden of our Surrey home on the day we bought it, during the house build and two years on.

We were very lucky this time, as other than the scaffolders, who you can never ever trust to be delicate, all our trades have been super careful. Plus, our scaffold has been sitting on a ten foot deep raised patio, so there’s a good 25 feet or more between workmen and anything resembling a bloom.

You can’t be precious with anything within this zone. If you don’t want it destroyed then remove it. You can’t expect people to build scaffold and create a beautiful home for you without a great deal of mess.

If there is work at the front of your home and you have a gravel driveway, then it’s possible to add walk boards down, or tarpaulin to protect it. We did not do this as the scaffold at the front of our house was so huge there was just no room to protect anything. I promise you we will be out there with a metal detector (already on order) searching for nails in the gravel. The last thing you need after a build is a flat tyre.

The haven

Of course, we are lucky, our garden is quite long, but what if you only have a postage stamp? Cordon off an area at the back of your garden, even if that’s only ten feet from your house, it doesn’t matter how small, work on that and make it pretty. Be sure to include seating, it’s going to become your haven, your island amongst a sea of rubble. It will save you.

That’s exactly what I did when planning Dorothy, our gazebo. I knew that it would become our safe house, a place where we could watch the devastation happening before our eyes, drowning our sorrows with a second glass of Chablis, as we survey the vastly over-budget roofing bill.

Just a bench, it’s all you need, perhaps a parasol in this heat too. But, that little corner of peace, a veritable embassy of asylum, will be one of the best things you ever decided to do.

Another garden I created before doing the house

The chat

Draw out your garden on paper, or if you like, take a photo of it from an upstairs window and then print it off. Mark out any expensive trees, shrubs and anything you particularly love. Then draw the buffer zone and the boundary between where your builder can be messy and where they will be killed instantly by the shrill, piercing cry of a screaming banshee.

Then call the meeting, perhaps provide refreshments and a slice of cake, you want them on side. Lull them into a false sense of security with a Victoria Sandwich, and then sock it to them with your reprimands if they so much as bruise your Annabelles.

The serious point is to make everyone aware of what the boundaries are, and where they are allowed to venture and not. Also, builders aren’t mind readers, so make it obvious. Just yesterday I spoke to our scaffolders first thing and asked them to be extremely careful with Mr. C’s banana (not a euphemism). He’s been growing it all summer and it’s huge I tell you! But once I asked them nicely, and most importantly, in advance, they had no problem avoiding the Musa Basjoo. In fact, they were quite interested and fancied one themselves.

The point

But, why bother with any of this at all? Why not just wait until all the burley men have gone (I’m not being sexist here, I’m sure female builders & scaffolders exist, but I’ve never come across one in the best part of 30 years)?

Well, for a start you won’t have any money left, the burley men will have taken it all. It’ll be years before you get the garden in order.

But also, if you plant out of harms way ahead of a build, then by the time it’s all over you will have a garden that looks like it’s been there forever. You’ll have designed it to blend and complement its new surroundings so that house and garden become a home.

Once the build is over, you’ll also get the joy of planting up the last third of garden, that buffer zone. There’s much to look forward to in that.

What’s more, that place of tranquility, that place where you can nurture and grow life, will be the one thing that will keep you from losing your mind. It will be your saviour. And, in a summer like the one we are having right now, it’ll mean you can be outside enjoying it all, having a BBQ on the weekends, reading under the dappled shade of a tree, or sipping something fabulous whilst guffawing with friends. Have I convinced you? I hope so.

Enjoy your day and thank you for reading.

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