How useful to have a big garden with dc??

[fififlowerpot33]

Am currently looking to buy a house for the first time and seen a lovely little house in nice area but with a poky garden. We don't have a garden at the moment anyway but just wondered how much families who do have them actually use them. (- I do fully appreciate we're lucky to potentially even have any form of garden) Love the house but wondered if i should resist because of the garden size. Any ideas for what you can do with a tiddly garden?

You can do nature projects in any size of garden! And have a BBQ even in a small garden.

With a bigger garden there is an alternative to going to the park for a run around, and you can have a paddling pool in the summer.

I would be happy to get a bigger house with a smaller garden, but dd and dp have the opposite viewpoint!

we nearly bought a house with a pokey garden but so glad we didnt. loved the house but in hindsight now i have a big garden i can appreciate the difference it makes to family life.
sitting on the patio watching the childern play, breakfast outside,bbqs in the summer, birds singing all day...bliss.
with a small garden the kids cant have a pool up in the garden and have grass to run around on at the same time.
we are out in the garden as we speak and i wouldnt want to be anywhere else well the maldives, obviously

My garden is poky but in a lovely area

We had reservations because of the garden size but still big enough for paddling pool in summer and for general toddler play. We are near to a park which provides greater scope for running around etc. Also as I work, the children simply weren't at home often enought to really make most of big garden anyway.

You probably get used to whatever you have. We used to have a small garden, when we only had dd1 and that was fine - now it's quite big (imo, these things are relative!) and it's nice to have a place where the girls can run around safely, let off steam after school and so on. It would be hard to lose it now.

We have a fab house but quite a small garden, small lawn and patio with a table 4 chairs and a bbq. Ideally it would be nice to have a larger one, but we have a park and large grass area 2 mins walk away for footy etc. Particularly with boys I find you need space for them to run around.

Garden is a LIFE SAVER!

Just needs to be big enough to kick a ball.

we used to just have a small courtyard and it was hellish! Now we have a nice medium sized garden with a little pond, a patio, some fun stuff, lots of animals & growing things. And I love it! I dont think I could ever go any smaller. But it really isnt huge! I am rubbish at measurements though so am not sure what size it is. But some days I feel like I live on a farm! LOL but really I live in a 2 bedroom semi-bungalow!

Now the children are older I'm glad of a big garden because on nice days you can turf them out to occupy themselves, when they were babies we didn't have much of one at all but it's worth paying extra for I think.

well DS loves his wheelbarrow, and "fishing" in the pond, and planting potatoes and all sorts. He even planted tulips for me! How many children do you have, what are their ages & how long do you want to stay in the house? Those are all big factors.

I think it depends how old your kids are and how many you've got. We went from a house with an enormous garden to one that was so completely child unfriendly we couldn't use it (forces married quarter so ltd choice of houses) and all our then 13 month old had access to was the patio bit which he was completely happy with, we moved again when ds1 was 25 months and ds2 was 3 months and had a garden which was big enough to hold one of those climbing frame / swing / slide combos and now that the boys are 2 and 3 it's totally invaluable as I can throw them in the garden to tire them out.

All that said, it depends if your dd is a particularly outdoorsy child or whether she is happy just pottering about in nice weather with the paddling pool etc.

Personally I feel a bit hard done by if there isn't space for an adult table and chairs with a liitle bit of room for kids stuff so we can all be outside together. Having lived in 4 houses in 4 years I do think you adapt to what you've got and I find the downstairs room/ layout much more important.

Good luck with the house buying!

Thanks for the comments, I guess it would be big enough for pottering around for my dd,2 but my ds is 6 and well into football which he definitely couldn't do much of (lots of keepy-uppy though! It's about 12' in length but because it's in a crescent it narrows to a point. We would be fairly near a park though. It's really hard to decide as we could only afford a bigger garden in a much less nice area! I'm not sure what's more important.

If you've got a boy you'll probably find that most gardens are too small for football quite honestly. You just end up taking them to the park anyway, especially as they have friends round.

I'd say small garden in nice area rather than big in not nice area, any day. We had a similar choice to you and we deffo made the right one.

it sounds to be that if you buy the house you will always wish for a bigger garden.
in the summer the garden is the most important place in the house in my opinion. and what ever area you live in there are always nice people about.

Is the house in an area where the DC could play outside with friends?

Our new build house has a garden, not massive by any means but big enough for BBQ/seating area/large shed (am working on getting rid of that, what is it with men and sheds?) a lawn and nice borders, we managed to get one of the smaller TP climbing frames and slides on the lawn and the boys can run around. TBH, once they hit 7/8/9 years old I'd have hoped we'd moved anyway, but it isnt a run for miles area. Far from it, Id prefer it double the size tbh.
Mind you last year the weather was so blooming awful we barely got to use it anyway!

I think area is v important though, I would personally choose a nice area over big garden.

Here in sunny Edinburgh even double income professionals are raising their kids in flats as houses with gardens are beyond the means of most, unless you move outside the city.

I live in a lovely flat but I don't have kids. If I did, I think I'd be willing to move to a less pleasant area in order to have a garden, even a small one.

We do have a shared garden but we live three flights of stone stairs up from it, so not child friendly at all.

Good luck and enjoy the house hunting!

ps bear in mind the direction the garden faces: south facing is ideal, anything else is negotiable except north facing, which will be in shade most of the day.

yes, very important to check which way yours faces

ours is south-west facing so gets sun all day and evening from about 11am

ours isn't huge, but big enough for a lawn, shed, patio and somewhere to hang out the washing

has been fine for my 2 dc

much bigger, and it would have been too much extra work, i suppose

Going to sound really dozy here but I know that the front of the house gets lots of sunshine in the afternoon and the garden is at the back of the house so what does that mean sunny garden-wise?

well fifi, that might mean that the garden is east or north facing (the reason I say that is because what you describe is the exact opposite of ours)

not necessarily bad, depends really, it can be nice to have your brekkie on the patio in the sunshine for example, but might mean your evening bbq's are in the shade

If it's a north facing small garden I would definitely say no. We had a garden like this in our last house and had no sun in the garden from october through till March as the house put it in shadow.

A small garden that is west or south facing is usually best for sun at the best times of the day. There again a south facing garden may offer no shade...(perhaps not too much of a problem with our typically awful summers!

The other point is that it actually has a slightly bigger garden at the front which gets more sun and is a better shape. It is partially enclosed with a small wall and entrance to the driveway but no gates so not suitable for my 2 yo to be in. (or indeed my 6 yo without me out there) It's in a very quiet little close but still very open and visible to anyone walking walking past. Does anyone have any ideas on best way to utilise a front garden like that? It seems a real waste of space considering the dimensions of the back garden!