Saturday, January 21, 2012

Plants and Gates

The main garden planting has been finished and mulched along with the area along the edge of the drive. We have more bamboos, cordylines, blood grass, gingers, black mondo grass, liriopes, crotons and some more natives and it looks lovely. Its so great to look out and see the plants swaying in the breeze. The boys from Native Habitat Solutions worked really hard on what turned out to be quite a hot day. Great job thank you. I'm glad we got them in to do this area as the ground was so hard they needed to use pick axes and ended up digging out lumps of concrete kindly left behind by the builders. No way we'd have been able to manage that.

The fencers from Harris Fencing came later in the day and completed the privacy screens and gates across the side gardens. We went for the slated aluminum fencing in slate grey again and we are extremely pleased with the end results. The house now feels complete (well almost as we still have a small amount of hard landscaping to do) and I felt really proud of what we have achieved when I pulled up outside the house last night.

So far I think we have spent around $7,500 on plants, lawn and the gardening team which I think is really reasonable as our initial estimates for doing the gardens was around $15k. Hopefully the hard landscaping won't break the budget and we'll have some cash left over for some fun things like pots, statues, garden lights and a small water feature if we are lucky.

The next project will then be to get the cabinet makers in from Crafted Cabinets to come and do some entertainment units and storage for us. We have used Ross and his team before, they did all the cabinets for both my business premises, the kitchen in our old house plus a kitchen and storage areas in the granny annex and they always do a great job.

Today we will be taking it easy, going for a walk, a dip in the pool (if it's warm enough), play with the puppy and our son then a family BBQ, now that's the lifestyle we imagined when we started this process over 18 months ago.

Photos in the next post.

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