Small front yard area - design/advice

Hi all! New member here, after a bit of advice with a few things. Apologies this is quite wordy!

So up until last weekend, we had a large overgrown, patchy and rather unsightly cotoneaster plant in our small front yard area. Now, we do not! I chopped it down and removed the roots, etc on the weekend just gone (very cathartic, especially for an amateur DIY/gardener like me!).

Now we are left with a large-ish space under our bay window.



The bay window sill itself as you see is discoloured and we will be stripping the paint from this, and repainting.

My issues are this: at the moment the area in my garden is mainly soil, with large-ish stones and smaller pebbles. The large stones I will remove, but if we were going to install the sandstone, would we need to remove any of the soil/pebbles first? Or put down some kind of layer of material underneath before the stones are put on?

Plant-wise, the only idea I will definitely be doing is that in that far corner where you can see the black wire extended upwards, see this photo for area:



I'm going to install a trellis and put a clematis -probably in a large pot, and train it up that wall.

Otherwise, on the rest of the area I guess I haven't got much further than "place some plants in pots on the stone", but again am unsure what exactly. Something with colour of course, and hopefully that lasts the summer. Any ideas? Or even better, has anyone got a front area similar to my layout and could showcase how they have it (even if it's totally different to what I'm described!).

Many thanks for any guidance/advice in advance!

 

Thanks for your reply JWK, I picked up the heavy duty sheet last night, and materials to sort out the window sill.

RE: the clematis, would it be possible do you think to plant 1-2 clematis in the pre-existing soil in the corner I referred to, and fit the sheet around the planted stems, and then gravel on top of that area too (and around the stems)? My girlfriend really does want it to be gravelled all over but it occurred that if I planted these clematis that would be a good work around.

Also be interested if anyone else here has a similar size front area and how they might have designed it?

 

Slight update, but I've managed to get the front garden sorted as best I can. Being a complete novice I'm really pleased with how it was :




To how it is now:



Dianthus in long pots, planter with lavender and 2x trellis with Climbing Rose Madame Alfred Carriere in the corner.

 

That looks lovely great work .

 

Clean and simple - love it!
Plenty of space to put more pots, maybe a few herbs, if you want to later...

 

Looks great Ben

 

Good work Ben, cleaned up a treat love those tall terracotta pots with dianthus in.

 

Thank you all! I realise now that the picture is quiet dark, but I assure you it's actually quite light in that corner for the Rose - fingers crossed it grows a bit!

It's not as fantastically green as I'd like as we're a little concerned about the potential for things in pots to go missing while we're at work. Hence start small and see what happens. Good luck to anyone trying to take that Lavender planter though, weighs an absolute ton! But it's a start and a definite improvement than the state it was in. And I learned a lot about DIY/painting/different plants, which is great.

The back garden is a whole different kettle of fish and a much bigger task - will enjoy the summer for now and start thinking about that properly for autumn/winter! We should have had French Doors installed by then too, extra impotus. Will likely start a thread for the back garden around then, when I'm ready!