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With spring on the doorstep, it is nearly time to start spending more time outdoors in the garden. This means getting to grips with all those ‘sprucing up’ jobs including garden seating.
How to Add Some Fun to Your Garden
Spring means your garden is slowly coming back to life after the winter hiatus. And with temperatures still cool it might not be the time to sit out just yet but it does mean you can start making changes to your garden so that you can enjoy it in the summer.
1) Paint Your Garden Furniture
Let’s start with the obvious by adding colour to the garden furniture or seating to give it a new lease of life. Thankfully, the range of suitable coloured paints and garden furniture stains and varnishes have grown considerably in recent years.
Give the furniture a good clean before painting and sand it down too so that the paint has a rough surface to adhere to. Once dry, create some stencils and add some details, such as pretty gold stars or colourful daisies.
Reposition your newly painted garden wooden bench in a sun-soaked spot and spend many pleasant summer evenings enjoying the garden.
2) Create a Cosy Nook
A lot of the ideas we have come across include creating cosy seating nooks – and we think this is a great idea.
The ideas we love include;
- The Barrel – available to buy online, it looks similar to a giant hamster wheel with a flatter bottom! Install it in your garden, making sure it is well anchored down, and then add your seating. You can use a garden bench to enjoy the shade it offers or a smaller, bijou café-style dining set.
- Build-Your-Own Pergola – a great garden project that takes a little planning and a few basic tools, and strong wooden posts. If you have a patio ready, build your own pergola over the top of it and enjoy the shade it offers. We have come across great ideas that use expanses of voile panels to add even more shade and privacy to the seating area, great for romantic times together.
- Go Nautical! – the look never gets old and the stylishness and informality of a large ‘sail’ offering shade over the seating area is just perfect in our book. Available in a range of colours, if installed correctly – not too taut or loose – it will last throughout spring and summer, right into autumn. You may want to bring the material in over winter, but it is a hardy fabric, more than capable of withstanding the worse of the weather.
3) Light It Up!
Lights add romance, as well as a hint of functionality to your garden seating area. There are some amazing examples of stunning and stylish garden lights, but which styles are tipped for 2018?
- Clear globes – trends come and go, and it seems that for the garden this year, clear globe garden lighting is the must-have shape. Choose individual hanging globes complete with their own inbuilt solar panel as well as clear globes on a string. Hang from pergolas or drape artistically in plants and trees around your seating area.
- Shaped LED lights – LEDs are perfect for the garden simply because they are efficient, as well as non-heating. There are various shapes of garden lighting on strings that are ideal for draping over hedges and fixing to fences or walls. Again, we’ve noticed that the must-have shapes tend to be soft-glowing white rather than coloured.
- Coloured rope lights – but if you need colour, the predictions for a growing trend in 2018 is coloured rope lights – and the more the merrier! Wrap around tree trunks or use deep in flower beds for amazing backdrop lighting.
4) Add Heat
Garden seating is great, but if the colder spring evenings make it a little uncomfortable- add a source of heat to your garden. Or why not wrap yourself up in chunky knit wool blankets? Chimineas and firepits are always popular in the garden, and 2018 predicts that the must-have style of firepit will be a sleek modern look.
5) Replace Your Garden Furniture
Let’s be honest, if your garden seating has seen better days, no amount of garden lights and paint are going to make a difference. If the time has come to replace it, then why not invest in fun styles such as a banana bench. With luscious soft curves, it makes a welcome change from the blunt edges and angles of a traditionally straight garden bench (and, if you choose a hardwood banana bench, it will last for years!)
What will you do to create a fun seating area in your garden this year?
Anna is the marketing and office manager for Garden Benches – a premium supplier of high-quality wooden benches and other outdoor furniture.
