Ideas for a summer residence (57 photos): arrangement of a country house, recreation area, garden and vegetable garden

By arranging a suburban area, we get the opportunity to put into practice the most original ideas for a summer cottage: here you can do almost anything with your own hands, the main thing is to carefully plan the work.

In our article we will give several examples of such ideas, and also advise how to optimally arrange a recreation area and a vegetable garden with a garden.

You can make the landscape of a suburban area unique with minimal effort.

Country house

Most owners of suburban areas conditionally divide their territory into several functional zones.

These include:

Residential area, including a country house and outbuildings (bathhouse, terrace, balcony, etc.).
Recreation area – flower beds, playgrounds, gazebos, etc.
Gardening area.

In all these territories we can create a truly unique atmosphere, and with minimal financial and time costs. We just need to give free rein to our imagination and try to find uses for the most ordinary things.

House made of bottles

Let’s start describing the ideas for creative transformation of our dacha with the house itself:

The structure itself is usually built from traditional materials. The basis can be a container, a frame made of wooden beams with panel cladding, or a brick load-bearing “box”. At the same time, there are also original models of country houses that use, for example, empty glass bottles as building material.

Pay attention!
It is quite difficult to build walls from glass bottles, so you can get down to business only after theoretical preparation and solid practice.
That is why experts recommend mastering the technology on small architectural forms, such as a dog kennel, well blind area, etc.

Bindweed – great wall decor

To decorate the walls of even the simplest house, you can plant climbing plants along them for your garden.. Climbing along pre-stretched cords, they will quickly braid the entire building right up to the roof, and we will only have to periodically thin out the greenery in front of the windows and doors.

Original furniture for the house. Looks better than an old chair painted with oil paint.

Inside the house there is also where to use your creative skills. The wisest decision would be to refuse to use furniture, which we send to the country “exile” after losing its presentation. Creative tables and chairs made from irregularly shaped branches and roughly sawn logs will look much more attractive.

Advice!
Despite the desire to preserve its natural appearance, the wood must be carefully processed: firstly, remove all irregularities and chips using sandpaper, and secondly, impregnate it with a moisture-protective composition with an antiseptic.
Varnish or alcohol stain is used as a decorative layer.

Also, fragments of natural material can be used to make various household items.. For example, with minimal processing, wooden chocks make beautiful salt and pepper shakers, as well as flowerpots, candlesticks and lampshades for small lamps.

Salt shakers and flower pots made of wood

Recreation area

Lawn and flower beds

“Rock garden” on the site

However, home is only one place where we can put into practice all our summer cottage ideas with our own hands.

The site itself provides us with much more room for imagination:

Firstly, you can abandon the usual flat lawn at your summer cottage, which looks neat but boring. It can be divided into several flower beds located on terraces of different heights.

Pay attention!
Naturally, it is much more convenient to do this if the site is located on a slope.

Cacti in old shoes

Secondly, the flower beds themselves can be equipped with various decors. So, flowers look great planted in pre-painted buckets, barrels and other containers, as well as in cabinets or chests of drawers half buried in the ground.
The height of originality will be the car body, in the hood of which you can plant a small flower garden with bright and climbing plants.

Photo of a flower garden by car

You can also use various household items as creative flower pots: old shoes, umbrellas, teapots and even hats (naturally, made of dense material).
Thirdly, artificial reservoirs will serve as decoration for any site. Of course, the cost of setting up a real pond can be quite high, so it’s quite possible to use an old bathtub as a container. Let’s decorate its sides with boulders, plant several cattail bushes – and no one will guess what served as the basis for this pool.

Advice!
If the pond requires periodic water changes (which is desirable), then the instructions recommend laying the pipes in advance so as not to destroy the lawn.

Playground

Tire sandbox

If you have children, then in the corner designated for their games and entertainment, you can also implement simple summer cottage ideas with your own hands:

As an impromptu sandbox for the little ones, you can use a tire from a heavy truck dug into the ground. The larger the diameter of the tire, the larger the sandbox will be, and the more interesting it will be to play in it.
For older children, you can set up a proven invention – a tree house. As a base we use several thick boards attached to thick branches, and we make the walls either from panels of dense fabric or from plywood impregnated with a moisture-proof compound.

Advice!
The height of the house should be commensurate with the child’s age and physical capabilities.

Treehouse

And even in the smallest area you can allocate a nook for a child. It is best to place a small table in it, or make several ladders and horizontal bars from wood with your own hands.

Garden and vegetable garden

Optimizing beds

Country ideas from old things can also be implemented when using the site for its intended purpose – for growing vegetables, herbs, berries and fruits:

Translucent fence

Undoubtedly, the most popular item among gardeners is an ordinary plastic bottle. Most often, its neck is cut off and used as a container for seedlings, but you can come up with a more interesting use.
For example, from bottles filled with sand or pebbles, you can build a side for a path or bed. Such building materials will cost much less than border tiles, and will last a little less.
If we open the transparent bottle lengthwise, we will have at our disposal a sheet of flexible and fairly durable plastic. Such sheets can be used for lining mini-greenhouses, which are installed in beds with seedlings in early spring.

Option for arranging vertical beds from barrels

You can use old furniture as containers for the same seedlings. At the same time, taking as a basis a sufficiently large closet or chest of drawers, we can design unusual beds with a vertical layout, so that all plants receive a sufficient amount of sunlight.

Pay attention!
In addition to seedlings, strawberries and other light-loving crops are often grown in vertical beds made from cabinets or stacks of car tires.

Decorating the garden

Unusual solutions for decorating the area can also be used in the garden.

Moreover, there is usually quite a lot of free space between the trees, so we will have room to be creative:

Laying out a multi-colored path

The use of ceramic garden figurines is considered a classic. Traditionally, such figurines (gnomes, mushrooms, animal figurines) were used in European landscape design, but today, in our country, a wide range of similar products can be easily found in almost any specialized store.
Such sculptural compositions can be supported with special lighting. Solar-powered ground lamps are best suited: firstly, they work autonomously, and secondly, they can turn on themselves when it gets dark using a photocell.

Lamp with solar battery

Advice!
Most often, lamps mark the edges of garden paths, which greatly facilitates movement.

We also turn the paths themselves into a decorative element. The easiest way to do this is by filling with colored gravel. To do this, we either purchase material from different rocks that differ in shade, or we paint neutral gray crushed stone with special pigments that are resistant to atmospheric influences.

Birdhouse – “castle”

Bird feeders and birdhouses can be placed on trees. These products should be made as comfortable as possible, and at the same time original: birds will also willingly settle in them, protecting our garden from pests, and the trees will look much more beautiful in appearance.
Finally, you can pay attention to the trunks and branches. Where this will not interfere with the work and harvesting, you can hang various decorative elements: ribbons, bows, small mirrors, etc.
Structures made from steel tubes also make a good impression: they not only sparkle in the sun, but also emit a melodious whistle in the wind.

Conclusion

It is quite possible to collect interesting ideas for a summer residence by writing them down in a special notebook. Then, with the onset of spring, you will be able to choose what exactly you will implement this year, and what it should look like. You will find several rather original ideas, as well as a number of useful tips, in the video in this article.