When decorating your home, everything you do is aimed at keeping you and your family happy and comfortable. This also includes your backyard. What you should work towards is keeping it nice and tidy, but also towards turning it into a space that encourages you and your family to spend quality time together and bond. Here is how.
Make it green
Turning your backyard into a green oasis can be beneficial for your entire family and for a number of reasons. The nature’s green can improve your mood and make you more optimistic. During the heat of summer, the temperatures are always lower in green areas, and if you plant the right trees, they can provide the much-needed shade when the days get too hot to bear. Also, trees and bushes can filter the air from some of the dust and dirt of nearby roads, allowing you to breathe cleaner and healthier air. Plus, children generally enjoy spending time outdoors, so when you don’t have the time to take them to a park or the countryside, your backyard is the next best thing. It’s a place where you can plant grass and create enough green surfaces for them to play sports and hide-and-seek, or have a picnic with their dolls and plush animals.
Create safe surfaces
When it comes to surfaces which are safe to run on, easy to maintain and eye-catching, there’s probably no better solution than durable decorative concrete. It’s been gaining in popularity recently due to its many great qualities that make it family-friendly. First, it’s stable enough to turn it into a flat surface which will keep your furniture in place, avoiding accidents caused by sitting on chairs and losing balance due to uneven ground. Second, it’s hypoallergenic, which means a lot to the parents whose children have allergies. Third, it’s slip-resistant, which reduces the chance of your kids falling just because they spilled some water on their path. The list goes on, since it’s also easy to clean and its design is versatile enough to make your backyard completely different than any of your neighbours’.
Furnish your patio
If you have a patio, you should do your best to furnish it in a way that will be appealing to adults and children alike. This means colourful and durable outdoor furniture with plenty of seating space and with a table which can be used either for drawing and playing cards or for having a family dinner in the fresh air. You can even include a mini-kitchen or a barbecue, so that you can take the cooking outside as well. If the furniture is hard and uncomfortable, get plenty of cushions to put on your chairs and outdoor sofas to make it cosier for you and your kids. And if you can hang a hammock somewhere, that would make your outdoor living space even more charming. Don’t forget to install appropriate lighting fixtures, so that you can make your nights bright when you want to, or create a magical atmosphere with fairy lights hanging from your trees, fence or somewhere above your patio.
Recycle some old tires
Some good old DIY in your backyard can make it a pretty amazing place, especially if you have some old tires to spare. This is actually a great way to include your children in making something useful and beautiful for them to play. With half a tire and a few wooden planks, you can make a rocking horse, or any other rocking animal for your kids. If you make the wooden plank longer, you can even make a seesaw, in case you have two kids who love playing together. You can turn tires into garden chairs in vibrant colors, or place a round wooden board on top of a tire, draw a hash and paint some pebbles red and yellow to make a tic-tac-toe table. If nothing else, simply hang one on a tree and make a tire-swing.
By using these ideas, you can turn your backyard into a lovely place for you and your family to make memories and spend some quality time together.
About the author: Mike Johnston is a lifestyle blogger and DIY enthusiast from Sydney. He is a regular writer at Smooth Decorator. He has also contributed to numerous family-friendly, real estate and green living blogs. Mike’s goal is to create and share meaningful content that helps and inspires people.