As you may or may not have noticed, our garden is very much open to the street; we have a partial brick wall with cut-out diamond fencing above it, enabling passers by on the street to look into our garden. I always had intentions to add a bit more privacy to our garden, but never got round to it last year. I thought I had take ‘before’ photo, but turns out.. I hadn’t. So here’s a very terrible example of the fence beforehand from just after we have moved in (spy the sleeping dog)…
So the idea I had in mind was to use some reed screening ontop of the exiting fence. You can see in the photo above that the previous owner had already put some up on the first section of wall. I managed to find some online from Home Bargains at £4 for 4m, which was an awesome deal actually as everywhere else were selling the same size for beyond the £10 mark! I secured it in place with staples and some clear cable ties which attach onto the existing fence. To be honest, I’m not a huge fan of reed screening, but it is very cheap – the alternative would have been to add a proper fence to the top of the brick wall which would have cost far beyond what I wanted to pay. I also replaced the existing screening that was up, just so that it would all match. I’m a bit fussy like that.
This has probably blocked out about 60% of what you could see before – however you can still see through it somewhat. To fix this, I intend on adding a plant border against the length of this wall with some hardy evergreen climbing plants. This will obviously take time to grow, but for now at least we have a touch more privacy. I wanted to add a border anyway to narrow the existing path down, and also to add some more plants – I’m a plant lover after all! I wanted to reed screening to ‘blend in’ a little better into the garden so I painted it with some fence paint the previous owner had left behind. I think it would have looked better a little darker (like the existing screening in the top photo).. but free paint is free paint! I also trimmed it down at the top and bottom so that it had straight edges and looked a little less cheap..
We decided against doing this to the other walls, which do have the same privacy issues.. However, the wall at the back leads onto an enclosed private alley so that wasn’t a problem. The other wall which we share with our neighbours is only partly exposed as they have lots of climbing plants on their side anyway.. but I think we may add some more climbers to close up the exposed gaps.
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