Just looking for advice ahead of our first home visit.
Our house has needed a lot of work doing to it, which we have spent the past 2 years doing. This means that the garden has been really low on our list of priorities. It doesn't help that our next door neighbour was having building work done that meant he removed a lot of fence panels at the bottom of the garden to make room for builders (with our permission) but the panels have still not gone up - as it stands, you could walk from our garden across his garden and into the garden of the other house next door to him.
Our garden is very large and at the top of the garden there is another fence panel missing that is behind some very large trees. There is also a huge pile of old wood (from and the refurbishment of the house and from pruning the many many trees in the garden) that needs to go on a bonfire, but won't be able to do this for months and there is so much there that it will take a long time to get through.
We do have a patio that is entirely self contained apart from a path to the rest of the garden. There is a wall (about 4ft high) as a barrier in between. We are thinking of getting a gate so that when you walk out of our back door, you have a medium sized patio with a gate to the left (which you use to exit the property) or a gate infront of you that you can use to access the rest of the garden. This gate would be lockable and would therefore ensure that the patio is child-proof all the while we are working on the rest of the garden. This would also put my mind at rest as we have a dog who can currently only go in the garden on his lead - even if the rest of the fence panels were replaced, I'd feel uneasy letting the dog in the garden unsupervised as it's so big and he's so little and there's so many trees!
Do you think if we could get this done before we have a home visit, the social workers would think that our garden was safe enough?