Liz Maxwell, a quality and safety advisor for our Emergency Department appeared on last night’s (Thursday 25 February) BBC Two show, Your Garden Made Perfect.

Lucky Liz and husband Joseph, 49, got the show’s team in to give the glass veranda in their garden a makeover after applying to take part in the show, a spin-off of Your Home Made Perfect, in which homeowners get to see improvements before they’re made via virtual reality.

It was completed last November (see above), adhering to all Covid-related restrictions at the time, and Liz, 48, and Joseph have continued to make improvements since, including adding a hot tub, which they even enjoyed during the recent snow!

Liz, who joined our Trust in 2019, said: “My sister encouraged us to apply as we wanted to makeover the garden in our new-build home.

“It took six months of interviews via Face-Time and form-filling before we got to the final stage and I’m so glad we did. It was a great experience. They took us to the Yeo Valley Organic Garden for inspiration, and we went to a tropical garden centre in Hastings to choose flowers.”

Participants in the programme give designers a budget to work with, which they must be able to prove they can afford, although they don’t pay for the work themselves. Originally, Liz and Joseph had a budget of £20,000 which they’d saved up, hoping to realise Joseph’s dream of having a pool.

When they found the programme didn’t do pools, they worked with a more modest budget of £1,500 to make over the existing veranda. Since the professionals finished, Liz and Joseph have continued to makeover their garden.

Liz, who lives in Rainham, added: “We were really happy with what they did. When they finished, we spent the rest of our original budget on the garden, including a hot tub.

“Lockdown has been a really difficult time and this has made such a difference to us. We look forward to coming home from work and spending time in the garden. We’ve got an outdoor fire and we start heating our hot tub up each Friday night so we can use it all weekend – even in the snow! Our neighbours love it too after asking to have a peek!”

It’s not the first time Liz, who has been a nurse for 28 years, spending the majority of that time in operating theatres, has been on TV. During her time at St Mary’s Hospital in London, she appeared in the first series of Hospital.

You can catch her episode of Your Garden Made Perfect on the BBC iPlayer.

Below is Liz pictured enjoying the veranda with husband Joseph and bottom is the space before they got the experts in.