When we first moved into our Nest, this is what we found lurking down at the bottom of the garden:

Delectable. You see the wrought iron gate? That's our old back gate, which Andre bent in half with his bare hands so we could fit in into the car and take it to the local tip.

So, clearly the shed could not be allowed to stay. We built a new one in a different part of the garden, and set about taking down the hideous old one. Operations commenced in a fairly sedate manner, with saws and hammers:

But I swiftly realised that the fastest (and most entertaining) method for demolishing the shed would be to kick that mother to the ground:

Hiiiiiiii-yaaaaaaaaaa! Oh yes. That's how I roll.

Leaning:

And she's down! Victory is ours, muwahahahaha!

Well, not quite. Check out the vileness that we found stuffed down the side of the shed (not Enrique, of course - clearly he's a big puff-ball of fluffy Jack Russell gorgeousness):

Yep, that's a bunch of old Christmas tinsel. Seriously, what is wrong with people.

This is what we found underneath the shed - delightful:

I dug a border around the outside of the shed base, cos the plan was to turn it into raised beds. Man, I dug sacks and sacks of rubbish out of the ground. Shudder. I also dug up two majestic concrete gateposts, which for some inexplicable reason, a previous owner had removed from the gate at the front of the house, carried to the back, and buried under the shed. Yeah, there's nothing weird about that.

We convinced a couple of experienced craftspeople to build a circular stone patio for us (my parents):

They laid an MOT base, and the centre stone:

Three days of hard labour later, the Stone Circle of Servitude Fortitude was finished, and Andre and I set to work on building a gazebo:

And then a set of raised beds, which we planted with cordylines and hundreds of daffodils:

Here's how the patio looks today:

Yeah, I think I prefer it :-)

You can see these photos in our main Before & After gallery here.

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