Our homes have been so much more than homes in 2020. We’ve worked from them, exercised in them and stood outside them and clapped the NHS. We’ve put our children’s drawings of rainbows in our windows and shared doorstep drinks with our neighbours. We’ve cleared out cupboards, painted walls and grown our own vegetables. In this series of blogs, we celebrate some of the ways our homes have helped us through the year – even if it wasn’t quite the year we were planning.

Thank goodness for the garden

This winter I will not complain about the muddy wellies, coats and waterproofs that spill out across every inch of available floor space in my back hall. I will bite my tongue when the dog races into the kitchen leaving a trail of muddy paw prints in her wake, and I will ignore the icy blast that sweeps through the house every time the children forget to shut the back door.

Instead I will learn to except these small irritations for what they are: irritating but insignificant. Because our garden has become far more than an extension of our living space this year – it has provided freedom, fresh air and a place to enjoy spending time.

It was during the first week of home-schooling that I began counting the hours until ‘school’ would be over and we could return to the familiarity of parenting – the task at hand seemed somewhat insurmountable. That was until – on the fourth day of bribing my five-year old with marshmallows – I realised that perhaps our garden offered the solution.

And it did.

It became somewhere to learn, a place to feel productive and a space to enjoy time because now we had significantly more of it.

During the week we took delight in the simple adjustment of chalking spellings onto the patio (rather than putting pen to paper) and learnt about the solar system by creating a model on the lawn with every ball  you can imagine. At weekends we tended to the space that had become our sanctuary: we cleared and weeded borders, cut back fruit trees and created a vegetable bed, giving the garden its own purpose.

Lockdown was a lesson learnt in appreciating the simplicity of time spent outside and, while the winter months will bring mud and mess, I will continue to look at the garden for the benefits it brings rather than the inconveniences. IOK, Wiltshire

Further information

This series of blogs is inspired by Savills new advertising campaign, To Every Home That's Been So Much More Than A Home – Thank You and Merry Christmas. Over the next few weeks a selection of guest bloggers will reveal just how much their homes have meant to them this year.