Nice Home Live

A cottage garden is a great design if you have just built a kit home.   This sort of garden is filled with colour, with many flowering plants, including plenty of roses, snapdragons, pansies, peonies, poppies, sweet peas, lavender, hyacinth and other old fashioned flowers.  You need to first plan your garden, decide what you are going to grow and set up a few structures for your plants to grow over, such as a pergola.  Having climbing roses growing up the side of patios and other structures can really improve the look of your garden.

 Design

Draw up a plan of your garden space that is available around your kit home.  Work out where any pathways or structures will go then build your garden around them. Make sure you include any fences as well as any established trees.  Look at the garden during different times of the day so that you know which are shady areas and which parts of your garden will get full sun.  You will need to know this when choosing your plants because there are plants and flowers that do better with full sun and others do better in part shade.  Also plan what plants, trees and flowers you want to put in and whether they will work well together.  Think about which flowering plants are best suited next to others, in terms of what colours will blend well together.  Cottage gardens often look like a jumble of plants all thrown in together but there is actually a lot of work behind them.  Know what season plants will flower and arrange your garden so that you don’t have large bare patches without colour during the year. Read the rest of this entry »

Once you have finished building your kit home you can look at putting on the finishing touches.   Kit homes come in many designs and suit both rural and suburban areas as well as being a great style of home for use as a beach house.  You can have a kit home with either timber or steel frames, with steel being particularly good if your property is close to bushland as it is more fire resistant as well as being pest resistant.  Finish your new home off by adding a patio or a veranda and putting in a garden.

Garden
A garden will improve the look of a kit home and will also increase its value.  If you have built your new home on a vacant block  you can improve the look of your home with plants, trees and an area of lawn.  If you have children you might want to put in a play area with swings, a sand pit and a cubby house. Design your garden first, know what you want it to look like and draw up a detailed plan.  Look at what will grow best in your area, check the soil type and get help from your local nursery. Read the rest of this entry »

A cottage can be a true work of art, a personal paradise, and an incredibly fun place to live. That said, space is always an issue in smaller buildings. There can be clutter, and more to the point, cramped living space. “Cosy” is one thing, “obstacle course” is another. Creating external space can solve these problems and quite literally add an extra dimension to cottage life. Verandas, pergolas and other additions can achieve wonders, almost effortlessly, and quite cheaply, far cheaper than renovations.

The cottage lifestyle is brilliant for a truly well developed excursion into graceful, rather than merely gracious, living. Modern cottages have the huge advantage of allowing eclectic, mature tastes to express themselves. There’s no “lifestyle dictatorship” of fashions in cottage living.  in The cottage itself is only part of the lifestyle, and the external space, particularly a garden area, is the other key component. That’s where creating external space becomes an art form, and where true creativity can have a ball. Read the rest of this entry »