We Crazy!

Well no-one's going to argue with that, are they? We've undertaken a giant renovation with a budget that we now know was absolutely ridiculous, and we've spent all of our spare time for the last few years working on it.

But hey. We can't help ourselves. That's old news.

I'm actually talking about a different kind of crazy.

Remember this front yard landscaping plan I came up with?

Well yes, those paved circles were crazy, so we replaced them with 'diamonds' of pavers, but as you can see, we still had a lot of spare space that needed filling.

So, following my design, we decided that we needed pavers in varying sizes to fill those gaps. We did a bit of trawling online, and didn't really come up with anything that fitted that bill other than 'crazy pavers'. Aha! Finally see where I was going with that blog title?

We found an option online that was called Byron Black Random Crazy Pave from a store called 'Bricks Blocks Pavers Online'. You could only buy them by the crate, and including shipping, they would cost us about $680. Certainly not cheap!

Source

But they were exactly the kind of look we were wanting, and we did a ring-round and didn't find anything else even remotely as appropriate. Plus, given that each crate contained about 19 square metres of pavers, that worked out to only $35.79 per square metre, which is not a bad price for a good quality limestone product.

So, we bit the bullet and ordered. And this extremely heavy crate arrived on our driveway.

And as I'm wont to say, then the fun part began.

I actually busied myself laying out the crazy pavers while Tom was concreting to his heart's content, so it kept me nicely busy. I started with the little strip of space between our fancy pavers at the front gate and the diamond in the downstairs area's front yard.

And then just kept going on the area towards the front door.

I actually enjoyed this task immensely. Aside from the fact that it involved carrying around extremely heavy blocks of stone, it also involved two things that I love:

1) Jigsaw puzzling

2) Hitting things with a heavy object without fear of the consequences

Okay, that last one made me sound like a bit of a psycho. But who doesn't enjoy guilt-free destruction? See quite a few of the pieces of stone in the crate were very large and in need of breaking up to actually accomplish our whole 'crazy pave' look. So, all I needed to do was perch the big piece of stone at an angle on a brick and hit it in roughly the right place with a swing of the mattock. It was good fun. Wish I had a photo. You'll just have to enjoy the result instead.

So with that side of the front yard done, I moved on to the other.

Our makeshift garden bed edging (i.e. pieces of timber and concrete blocks) worked very nicely to separate the areas that needed paving from the areas that would become garden eventually.

Allie of course had to have her say in some of the placement of the stones. After all, getting four feet all standing on pavers at the same time without falling through the gaps is probably a lot harder than two!

And in a surprisingly short time, we had a transformed front yard!

 

So even though we're still not finished, I think it's still a good time for a 'Before' a 'During' photo comparison!

Not a bad improvement, huh? We've still got quite a bit of work ahead of us though, fixing the crazy pavers in place and filling up all of the gaps between them (we're thinking of concreting them in), making garden beds and planting them, and finishing up all of the fencing that is currently lacking. We're getting there, though!