Welcome to our garden.

How difficult if you both want something different. Please do share your various ideas and see if anyone has any useful inspiration for you! The clematis and the jasmine sound lovely.

Your Garden looks lovely the sand pit and climbing frame means you have children so they are your first priority as it is their playground and needs to be safe the show garden will come later when the have out grown the play things but just keep encouraging them to plant and grow a few plants in the meantime and enjoy !!

It's difficult to start from a basic shape, especially when you both have varying ideas. Most important is to define what you need the garden for - children to play, pets to be safe, summer barbeques, all of which need some space.
Perhaps you could define an area which could be just garden and not have to blend into the other uses. You do have the lovely patio area which you can fill with pots, start with annuals until you know your preferences. Looking through other peoples gardens on here is a good start, click on 'p' at the bottom of the page for patio ideas, other letters for other areas. Full of great pics and ideas. As you are on the outskirts of Norwich have you been to look round the 'Urban Jungle' at Old Costessey? It's lovely just to look round! Lots of open gardens for the NGS too at this time of year.

Hi Sarah and Adrian, if I can make a suggestion, please take a little time to think things through as Honeysuckle suggests. Define what you want from your garden and in particular watch the movement of the sun. This is particularly important for some plants and of course, the siting of any seating or BBQ area. My wife and I took 12 months to design ours, we moved into a new house with nothing in the back garden at all apart from fence and hedge. If one of you is good at sketching, draw a few plans out. One of my suggestions would be, move away from the oblong shape and give the borders some shape. This can be done by lifting some turf from a bed and placing it somewhere else. You have a golden opportunity here to design and effect something you can both be proud of. Even better you have one of the best gardening encyclopaedias (GoYpedia) as a reference. Take a look at some of the designs and pool your thoughts. I'm sure you'll both come up with something really nice that suits the whole family. Of course, also look at how much time you have to maintain your garden, this also can play a big part in your decisions. "GOOD LUCK".

It all takes time to get it to be how you 'want' :O) take your time enjoy your kids and just do little bits at a time. Good advice from others on here, kids first garden later. Enjoy yourselves whatever you get up to in the garden its for pleasure for all of you. :O)

We had a good day in the garden at weekend.

We have been away from here because we have had the house extended. Built on the side return, so we have not really lost any garden. If we can get used to keeping the garden tools in the garage we will not miss the shed even. Then as we tried to decide how to remodel the garden our youngest son was taken ill. We are over that now and keen to make a family garden.

At the moment we are thinking of herbs on the patio for the guinea pigs, a dining area on the shed base, a veg bed for the guinea pigs, seating where the climbing frame is, Somewhere to play swingball and retain some lawn.

Is there room for swingball on the patio? Then perhaps you could have a small herb garden at the sunny end of the garden.
Why not borrow a few books from the library for some design ideas? You can see then how a few wider beds look more interesting than a border of narrow ones. Looking at what other gardeners have done is a brilliant way of getting your ideas flowing.
It was interesting to read that your herb and veg gardens will be for the guinea pigs , not for the kitchen!

Sorry your son was so ill - its good to hear he is better now.

Steragram,
Thank You for the reply, yes, it is interesting that we are growing for the guinea pigs. We are finding it difficult to agree on what can be sacrificed to permit a 1800 x 600 bed for the vegetables. There is a bed where we once had a glut of salad, we are thinking about moving the plants to be more prominent from the house and planting veg there.
We still do not have a model to experiment with, and I feel that is an autumn activity rather than late winter/early spring.

Reading on here I am encouraged to try and revive rather than replace the grapevine.
With regard to the wider beds they might help to accommodate the 'Rudebekia' which seems to relish being in our garden.