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Your garden makeover could include paving, formal planting and a seating area. You could even add a pond or water feature, use an existing hedge for shelter and privacy.

The Garden Makeover competition to win £1000 is open to any gardener who is in need of a money prize to kick-start their garden landscape ideas, rather than a Chelsea medal

If your garden is a bit of a disaster and you are planning a garden makeover you can head over to

DIY Doctors Gardening Section for some ideas.When you have your plan for your dream garden

you can enter it into MyBuilder.com’s £1,000 garden makeover competition, which will then go to the public vote.

Ryan Notz CEO of MYBuilder.com explains
“At MyBuilder, we’re passionate about helping homeowners find the right tradesman. It’s upsetting when we come across homeowners who don’t have the means to hire a tradesman, so we feel it’s our duty to help out when we can. The hardest part is choosing a winner, which is why we’ve enlisted the public to vote.”

If you want some gardening ideas DIY Doctor has planting ideas for modern gardens, vegetable gardens and gardening for wildlife in our Gardening Section, and here are some ideas to get your creative juices flowing:

For the contemporary garden how about building your own home Cinema, which is a great idea if you like to use your garden for entertaining.

Or if you are considering a landscape garden project what about a rockery? There are ideas for building and planting your rockery garden. Alpine plants are generally easy to care for and building the rockery will help to overcome problems with garden drainage. Some thing competition hopeful Lisa Marie from Sandbach, Cheshire reconises all to well, following the floods last summer.

“Ever since the bad rain we had at the end of last year our garden has been a mud bath. We have 3 children under 5 and as we live on a main road they can’t play in the front garden. We have run out of cash to do anything with it…” Lisa Marie – competition hopeful

If you want a productive garden our gardening section also explains how to build raised beds which are great for vegetable gardening and for gardeners who have reduced mobility.

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As we are getting towards the end of Climate Week we thought we should share some of our successes with you.

I called into my local supermarket for a small shop and used my fantastic stripey bag!

DIY Doctor employees have not picked up a single supermarket plastic bag, and while we know that this should always be the case, the very fact that we have managed to get everyone (even the men) to stop using plastic bags when they nip in to buy stuff, it means that our Great Green Climate Challenge has been a success this week.

Like any campaigns it is tempting to think that a small change in behaviour can’t make a big impact. However it is important to understand that a small change in action or attitude is effective because it is more sustainable.

As part of Climate Week we have partnered up with our green colleagues, Be Energy Smart and Green Reviews, to encourage all our users to take a small step towards a greener lifestyle.

Hopefully you have joined in with our challenge, but if you haven’t yet you still have time. There are loads of action pledges you can make which are simple enough to fit into anyone’s life, but added together they make a huge difference to our combined carbon output.

It doesn’t cost you a penny to join or to donate, because the donations are pledges of action not money.

Here are a few examples of what you can do from the DoNation site

‘Walk on’ walk to where you are going rather than using a vehicle – less petrol, better for you. Another great idea as the days get longer and lighter is to organise a ‘Walking Bus’ for school children. If you are feeling really energetic you can pledge to ‘Run in’, which is to run to where you are going – great  if you have the energy, and a shower at work!

‘Shower power’ spend a little less time in the shower, saves energy heating the water, you could also shower at a slightly cooler temperature. This has the added benefit of waking you up in the morning!

‘Lag your loft’ one of the most efficient and cost-effective ways of saving power and money, is to put more insulation in your loft.

‘Lift share’ if you cant walk or cycle to work why not pool your car, this is much more efficient and splitting the petrol money between you will be a benefit all round.

‘Degrees cooler’ If you still need your heating on turn it down a degree or two, you are unlikely to notice the difference, except in your pocket. Wash clothes on 30 degree cycles too.

For more details on these and lots of other carbon reducing pledges you can make go to the DoNation website, and check out their challenges. If you want to get involved we would be really grateful if you would make a pledge to our Great Green Climate Challenge, and as an added incentive each time you donate a pledge your name is entered into a prize draw to win a Solar Powered Radio.

Go to the Great Green Climate Challenge page to see more information about how to give and how to win!

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Mike Edwards From DIY Doctor is pledging the kettle challenge – to only boil the water he needs.
Simple, but effective as he likes his coffee!

DIY Doctor, Be Energy Smart and Green Reviews have teamed up to make a difference for Climate Week.

What is Climate Week?
It is an initiative that inspires us all to make a difference to the climate by making changes in our lives, these changes can be a simple as avoiding using carrier bags, or as energetic as cycling to work. The idea is that you pick the things you can fit easily into your life, in the hope that these ideas will stick with you throughout the year and then inspire you to make more green changes.

When is Climate Week?
Climate Week runs from the 4th – 10th March 2013. Why not go to the website and set up your profile, you can then pledge donations – which are in actions rather than money.

What can I do?
It is all going on at the DoNation website. Go to the page set up by Be Energy Smart to make a pledge – BeEnergySmart: The Great Green Climate Challenge. You will see the pledges already collected, and the ones we have pledged to do. Click on the ‘do something’ button and you will be given a list of choices.

There are loads of ideas for different pledges, including:

• Filling up your kettle only as much as you need to – and get that cuppa quicker!
• Cycling to work – get healthier and save carbon!
• Feed the Earth – making compost for the garden
• Smart Drive – accelerating and braking smoothly to save fuel.
• Sharing things with neighbours and friends – a great pledge for DIY enthusiasts!

You are bound to find something that suits you, maybe something you keep meaning to do, or something so simple you hadn’t even thought about it before.

If you want to be more ambitious you can make up your own challenge – let your imagination run wild!

A reward for your efforts
Be Energy Smart, DIY Doctor and Green Reviews have teamed up to offer you a great green giveaway. If you make Climate Week pledges, we will enter you into a draw to win a fantastic Roberts SolarDAB radio. All you have to do is pledge to do something to reduce your carbon footprint between now and the 10th March.

The winner will be able to listen to high-quality music in truly sustainable style, with the world’s first solar powered DAB radio. Each pledge you make gives you another chance to win, so pick as many as you can!

Who is involved?
Members of DIY Doctor, Green Reviews and Be Energy Smart teams will be make their own pledges too. They will be using their blogs and Twitter to keep you updated with how they are doing, throughout the week.

Be Energy Smart is a brilliant independent energy-saving advice website. They have loads of information about Eco Friendly products and you should check out their simple free assessment tool to find out exactly which energy-saving improvements could save money in your home. www.beenergysmart.co.uk

Green Reviews is a fab one-stop-shop for reviews of just about any green product you can think of, from washing machines to solar panels. www.greenreviews.co.uk

You already know that DIY Doctor is the UK’s best-loved DIY advice website, with friendly, down-to-earth advice to help you through any Home Improvement and DIY tasks. www.diydoctor.org.uk

The competition will close at midnight on the 10th March, and we’ll be notifying the winner on the following day. Good luck!

Why not tweet your pledge, to let us know how you’re doing? @DIYDoctor

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DIY Doctor will be on the Tricks of The Trade Stage at the National Homebuilding and Renovating Show at the NEC in Birmingham next month.

The show starts on the 21st March and runs until the 24th March 2013. Mike Edwards from DIY Doctor will be running a series of talks and demonstrations including how to plaster, how to lay tiles and how to avoid cowboy builders.

Are you planning a build?
The National Homebuilding and Renovating Show organisers have asked us, to ask you, how you intend to use finance to fund your build, renovation or extension, for the coming year. So if you have a moment to fill in their survey, they are offering a chance to win 1 of 5 prizes of £100 worth of high-street shopping vouchers.

The National Homebuilding and Renovating Show have partnered up with Experian for this survey. The idea is to examine the use of credit and financing on the homebuilding and renovating industry.

For your convenience the survey has been designed to make it easy to fill in on what ever device you prefer to use. You can complete it using a PC, Mac, iPad and most smartphones.

It will be very interesting to see what the research reveals – so if you have the time Please follow this link to complete their survey.

We would also like to see you at the show – so if you want free tickets as DIY Doctor guests then please click on the image below.

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Have you completed a grand design in the last two years, and would you like to gain recognition for it?

If so, you could enter your self build project into the Grand Designs Award 2013, for the chance to win this sought-after accolade, and then brag about it onstage to Kevin McCloud at the Grand Designs Show.

The Judges are Kevin McCloud (obviously), Lisa Allen – editor of Grand Designs Magazine, award-winning architect Phil Coffey, and Naomi Clever who is an interior designer and design consultant (you will have seen her on Channel 4 home design programes such as ‘Other people’s houses’, and ‘Honey, I ruined the House’).

The deadline for Grand Designs Award entries is the 7th March 2013 and it is an easy online registration process.

It is free, and is open to anyone who, within the last two years, has built or transformed a building; whether they are in the trade, or a related profession (such as an architect), or not.

The judging process is done anonymously to be completely fair and open – according to the Grand Designs website these are the criteria they will use to judge the award.

Entries will be judged anonymously using a points scoring system, and will consider the following criteria:

• Function
• Originality
• Innovation
• Aesthetics
• Sustainability
• Attention to context
• Cost

So if you have built or transformed something truly grand/amazing/eco/beautiful, then why not have a go? let us know if you go for it, we would love to see pictures of your entries.

If you win we would be proud to feature you and your build on DIY Doctor too, as we love to hear of people’s Home Improvement sucesses.

Click here to go to the Grand Design Awards application form.

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