There’s a particular kind of magic when spring finally tips into summer. A few weeks ago the garden was all soft colour and tulips in full bloom, and now, almost overnight, it has shifted again. The foxgloves are pushing up tall, the dahlias are finding their feet, and everywhere we look the house and gardens seem to be asking us to keep up.

So this stretch is a busy one. We’re splitting our days between finishing the attic, swapping out the old garden door that has been slowing us down for months, and getting the vegetable beds planted before the window closes.

The Door I Kept Hitting My Head On

Between the front garden and the back garden sits a little covered area, and in it, until this week, sat a very small door. If you’ve watched our videos on the outside spaces you’ll have seen it lurking in the background. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve cracked my head on that frame.

The size was the real problem, though, not my skull. The opening was too narrow for a wheelbarrow, so every garden chore meant going out the front of the property, through the gate, up the impasse and in through the other gate. Getting a bike through involved a lot of jiggling and muttering. For a door you use every day, that adds up to a silly amount of wasted time.

I did think about making a replacement myself, but there wasn’t time this season, so we bought one. The plan: widen the opening, hang the new door, and give Romy proper access for all the front garden work she has planned.

Hicks Blue, Coat By Coat

Before any of that, the new door needed painting. Romy took this one on and spent a few days working through primer and top coats in the workshop. The colour is Hicks Blue by Little Greene, the same colour as our front door, so the two ends of the house will match.

Painting a door sounds quick until you actually do it. You paint one side, then wait for it to dry before you can flip it over and do the other, and the whole thing stretches over days. Romy’s patience was wearing thin by the end. If you have a good tip for painting both sides of a door without the endless waiting, she would genuinely love to hear it in the comments.

Widening The Opening

With the door painted, the opening itself had to grow. Out came the grinder and the old frame, and the doorway was cut back and squared up to take the wider door. This part of the week was loud, dusty and very satisfying to watch back.

Walking Straight Through

The new door is in, and it has already changed how we use the garden. No more hitting my head. The wheelbarrow rolls straight through from back to front, and the bikes follow without any of the old contortions. It looks much better than what was there before, too, especially in that blue.

The area around it still needs work. The wall is damaged and needs repairing, there are gaps around the frame to fill, and we’re thinking about cladding that wall in wood down the line. None of that is the priority right now. The point of doing the door first was access, so Romy can get on with the front garden without the daily detour, and on that front it has already paid for itself.

Meanwhile, Up In The Attic

Last time we finished laying the wood fibre insulation under the roof, a milestone months in the making. What’s left up there is the tail end of that job: the rest of the membrane, finishing the railings around a few areas, and possibly taking out the ancient radiators.

Those radiators aren’t coming back. We’re planning a reversible air conditioning system up here instead, which keeps the floor clear so we can make the most of the space, and gives us cooling in the hot summers when we need it. Once the membrane is done we’ll clean the space up and get it ready for plasterboard, then move on to the internal walls. The one thing that might slow us down is the electrics. The plan is agreed with the electrician, and now I need to pin him down to a date.

Planting The Summer Beds

While I’ve been up in the roof, Romy has spent the last few weekends filling the raised beds in the back garden with flowers and vegetables. This year she’s going all in on companion planting, tucking marigolds in among the tomatoes.

The beds went from bare soil to neat rows of seedlings in a weekend, with a bit of improvised shade rigged up to see the young plants through the hottest afternoons.

Foxgloves Take The Stage

In the front garden the tulips are over. Sad, but expected, after a very hot April. The consolation is the foxgloves, which are properly coming into their own and look dreamy. Romy sowed some of them back in February last year, so seeing them finally tower over the beds is a long payoff.

She’s clearing the spent tulips rather than leaving them in the ground. You can leave tulips in, and plenty of varieties will come back year after year, but you have to leave the stems and leaves to die back and feed the bulbs, which looks messy and hogs space for weeks. This is only our second season with this garden, and Romy wants to trial as many plants as possible to learn what works, so the tulips make way for annuals and dahlias now, and more bulbs go in come autumn.

The whole week, from the first coat of Hicks Blue to the last seedling, is in the video at the top of this post. If you know the trick to painting both sides of a door without losing days to drying time, or you have companion planting pairings you swear by, the comments are open, and we do read them.