Get your Outdoor Seating Area Ready
In Britain you never know when the good weather will start, or quite when it will finish. It could be that this spring might actually be an early summer! Whether you have a patio, deck, balcony or garden seating area, there are plenty of things you can do to get ready. If you have a patio, it’s possible that the cold weather has displaced some of the stone, so give it a check-over and repair where necessary.
Make sure all outdoor lighting is either fully charged or the lightbulbs have been changed. If you have solar-powered lighting, it’s worth checking that the solar panels are nice and clean and that they have survived winter. Once your lighting is brought back to life, it’s time to turn your attention to your seating. If your seating has been hibernating in a shed or garage, it will need a good dust and clean. If you have wooden garden furniture, which lives outdoors all year round, it could potentially benefit from a thorough sanding down and re-oiling.
Stock up on Recipes
It’s goodbye to hearty soup and cottage pie, and hello to fresh, seasonal spring recipes. Spring is the season of vitality and life, so make the most of all the great meat, fruit and vegetables available. It doesn’t even take a lot of effort to collect recipes – plenty of websites and supermarkets will be plugging recipe cards in the run-up to spring – so collect as many as you can and make the most of the free inspiration!
Weed and Plant
It certainly isn’t as exciting as collecting and cooking recipes, but you’ll be pleased to have finished tending to the garden by the time summer rolls around. Once the weeding is out of the way, you can start to think about what you’d like to plant. This could be a great opportunity to grow a nice vegetable patch to fuel your new found spring recipe collection. A home vegetable patch is a great way to get cheap organic food, as well as being a fun outdoor hobby.
Spring is most commonly associated with flowers and other plants ‘springing’ into life. Tulips, Roses and Chrysanthemums all have beautiful, vibrant colours which will decorate and energise your garden. If you already have flowers, which are ready to bloom, make sure they are well fed and free of troublesome weeds.
Brighten things up Inside
Whether you’ve done it intentionally or not, it’s likely that you’ve slightly altered your interior to create a warm and cosy atmosphere during the winter. Dark wood tones, rich, rusty reds and thick woollen rugs are all common winter warmers. Now that spring is on the horizon, you want to represent the sense of vitality and life displayed by nature.
One of the biggest benefits of spring is sunlight. Vitamin D is suddenly not so hard to come by once the clocks change and the weather starts to warm. Make the most of natural light by replacing thick curtains with soft linen, utilising mirrors to reflect light, and create adequate floor and surface space.
Citations:
Roger van der Matten is Home Product and Design Director for East Sussex company, 4 Living, based in the United Kingdom