Garden before & after

Does anyone else suffer from DIY guilt? I had a bad dose of it yesterday: it doesn't matter how much I do, it feels like nothing ever gets finished. 

So to remind myself how far I've come, and because it's all springlike out there today, I dug out some pictures of how my garden was when I moved in, and some pictures of how it looks now (or how it did last summer, when it was tidy... ha ha). I'll be posting up some more rooms as I get my photo filing in order. For now, here's the garden BEFORE...

(Yes, that is a gnome wearing a fig leaf, middle right. I kinda regret losing him...). The flowerbed went the whole way down the left hand side of the garden, making it feel oddly claustrophobic. And there were sooo many colours going on. So, anyway, this is what the garden looked like after a bit of hard graft: decking where the sunniest spot is, for a bit of lounging (on Ikea chairs); a bit less flowerbed and some more private fencing (which was very hard to find in that style; in the end I got 6ft x 6ft panels intended for vertical use, and turned them on their side as I preferred the way they looked with horizontal lines).

Sadly, I managed to kill the gorgeous giant fuschia bush you can see in the top image, above, on the far right. But I planted a new flower-bed on the right side; put a fragrant star jasmine against the fence; planted a big jungly thing – the one poking out from behind the shed – that withstands all weather (gardening isn't my forte); put up a shed (OK, thanks Dad, he did that bit); had a suspended concrete bench built against the house wall, which gets the sun in the morning, and replaced the gnomes, which went to a good home, at my granny's, with a beautiful wooden heron I bought on holiday years ago in Brazil.

An improvement, I think... though it still needs work. Oops, must stop that.