dizzojay | At last - the Dizzo house is suddenly looking much smarter!

Over recent years, our little patio has started to look shabbier and shabbier. Our big silver birch tree's roots have wreaked havoc on it, and it was a mess of crooked and cracked slabs. Not only did it look awful, it had become a really dangerous trip hazard!

Because we knew we were going to replace it eventually, we lost interest in keeping it looking nice and clean, so in recent years, it had started to look like a building site!

Finally we had saved up enough to get it relaid, and it became a real building site last week! Now, we have a shiny new patio and we have a garden we can start being proud of again!

We've got a lot of smartening up of the rest of the garden to do over the winter, but that's a project we can do ourselves, we don't need a builder for that.

One of the most important things we need to do, is re-bunny proof it. I have no idea what those little ratbags are going to think when they're eventually let loose on it!

Our old patio was twenty seven years old - and it looked every day of it:

The builder has raised the new patio a few inches to future proof it against the tree roots, and the biggest root which ran along the left hand edge of the old patio mreant that slabs couldn't be laid there, so we've replaced them with a little gravel path.

I don't know if the new patio will last will last twenty seven years, but for now I'm just looking forward to spring evenings on it with a new table and chairs and a glass of wine!

A bit of an improvement, right?