Hello, we want to add parking to the front of our house but could do with some ideas please!
The front garden is currently not manageable for us - we have a back garden and paddock to keep on top of, plus three kids under 5 and a farm. The front is north facing and it's on a slope down to the road, so we just generally don't use it.
Planning to put it down to lawn mostly, but we'd like to add parking/turning at the top. There will be a gate and fence across the current driveway to the side of the house to make a secure area for the children to play. Currently all cars/deliveries etc drive up the side of the house and round the back to turn around.
The only thing I'm finding difficult to picture, is we have a door at the front of the house that we don't want used as the main door that deliveries/visitors come to. (Where the steps are between the two bushes). Our main door is to the side of the house. So I want to renovate the front in such a way that it's obvious you need to walk round to the side - does that make sense?
Second picture shows rough idea of what we were thinking - white area would be parking, and then we could plant up a low border (lavender or something?) around the edge of it, to act as a sort of barrier between the parking and unusable front door. But what would we do with the area the other side of the purple bits? Would it just look weird having that as lawn? I can't picture that.
Other idea which I would love to do, is build a decent sized porch where the steps are, make that entrance more usable, and then have hardcore in front for parking all the way across, and then lawn the rest of the way down. BUT I don't think we would be able to afford that (DH can do driveway himself but not proper building) unless anyone has any idea of doing that on a budget?
Any ideas very welcome! Thank you 