Designing the Garden

Purely by chance, a few weeks back, I saw an article on a 6 week garden design course being held at Stewart Park, which is just up the road from me, so I enrolled and the course started a couple of weeks ago.
Last week we all had a great time learning how to measure a garden and the features that are/can be in a garden, and as this week is half term, we have homework, which is to produce a liner scale drawing of the garden/area that we want to replan.
For me, that's the back garden, and as the weather was so nice today, and with the help of Tim. We spent a very productive afternoon taking countless measurements just to get the width, length and the positioning of the 2 sheds and greenhouse in the garden. This evening I've now put those measurements down on paper and I now have a very basic plan of the back garden. I now need to spend another couple of hours doing some more detail measurements of the placement of the paths, the curved boarders, patio areas (all 3 of them) and 2 circular flower beds, then transfer them onto the master plan.
It's surprising what you find out about your garden by doing all this measuring. I now know how big the 2 sheds are, the greenhouse is the size that I wanted (8 x 8), so no need to buy a new one and the garden tapers ever so slightly.
I've got photos to take of all aspects of the garden, at very times of the day, so that I've got an idea where the sun is, and what shadows are there are. It's really quite exciting and hopefully will mean that in the end a garden that does everything we want and we will know what and where to start first.