Mini Court Yard

Our little cottage is build into one of the hills surrounding the city of Bath, the entire row of cottages has the gardens to front  and the houses all sit with the bums buried to the second floor into the hill side. Most of the cottages used to have very small court yards to the back which had the wash house and outdoor loo but in the 1980s the council decided that they either needed indoor plumbing or they would pull the row down and replace them with a block of flats! Thankfully most people solved this by roofing the court yards over making them into kitchens or bathrooms. 

Our cottage still has a very small narrow space at the back, this is a pretty depressing little space and has been used for the last few years as a place to store lengths of wood covered in a tarp. It gets very little sunlight and is always slightly damp (we would not believe the number of toads I keep finding round there).

This is also the only light that gets into the kitchen, the sink is in front of this window so this is the view when washing up....

It looks for all the world like a small prison yard! Not the most inspiring of spaces.

So yesterday I cleared all the wood, rehoused the toads and dug out the big bucket of white masonry paint I brought 6 months ago. 

I cannot believe the difference this has made! Our kitchen now seems to have loads of light bounced into it! We where considering putting skylights in (which we cant afford) but this has suddenly made the room 100% sunnier! And as we had some of the scaffolding planks left after making the table I used them to give myself something to look at out the window...

I think my hostas and ferns will like it back here better then the front of the house which was always too bright. Its much nicer to look at now!

I have 3 cast iron fountainheads that Rich will attach to the wall when he's not a mo, which I'm planning to plant with trailing geraniums and nasturians. With blue sky it all looks very slightly Mediterranean, even the nettles at the top of the wall!