Well, with the bulk of the work done inside and the front yard well on its way to being finished, we wanted to get this baby renting ASAP!
So, even before we got everything finished, I zipped around and took some shots that we could put on a rental listing, so we could line up a tenant to move in once we'd finished everything.
As you can see, this was before I sprayed the tin on the back of the kitchen bench black and put up the curtains...
Or painted the bathroom mirror black (or installed it properly for that matter - it was precariously leaning up in this shot) and put handles on the vanity...
But the house looked mostly finished, if you didn't actually look down at the front yard...
So we had a few inspections and settled on a tenant, and then began the mad rush to get the finishing touches completed before they were due to move in!
First item on the agenda? Finishing the front yard! We quickly decided that we would just focus on the side that would belong to downstairs and not bother completing the upstairs side yet, with the tenant's move-in date looming.
So, to get us to the stage of being able to plant some plants and call the yard done, first we had to dig any rocks and yukky stuff out of our proposed garden beds. Lucky for you, I've covered up the part of Tom's anatomy that was on display while he shovelled out the garden beds.
He then whipped out the concrete mixer again and concreted in some black plastic garden edging along the edge of each garden bed, so we would have a clear division between garden and pavers.
Meanwhile, I hopped in the ute and took a trip to the landscaping yard to buy me some nice rich soil to fill the garden beds up with (note that I had already made a trip to the markets a couple of weeks prior to buy some plants). And we temporarily removed a big section of the front fence so that we could back the ute in and unload the soil directly off it into the garden. As you can see, we laid a drop sheet over the pavers to try to protect them from getting completely covered in soil. It worked fairly well.
And I mucked around with the plant placement until I was happy.
Then, of course, came the extremely enjoyable process of planting every plant. And that's when I realised how very many plants I'd bought! What made the process a bit more time consuming (and difficult) was the fact that we decided to put weed mat over each garden so that they could be as low maintenance and weed-free as possible. This therefore involved cutting little slits in the weed mat where each plant would be and then carefully lowering it while pulling the leaves of each plant through the slits. Not rocket science, but it takes it out of you when you're crouching on your haunches the whole time!
I'm afraid I didn't document this process with photos very well, since I was too busy groaning as I lost feeling in my legs. Interestingly enough, the more exhausted I am and/or the more pain I'm in, the less photos I take.
Nevertheless, we were determined to get this side of the yard finished before the day was out, so we forged on, and voila! Magic! It's done!
After I planted and weed-matted each garden bed we laid some basic sugar cane mulch over the top and gave everything a good water.
Meanwhile, on one of my landscaping yard trips I had bought a whole heap of bags of white pebbles to put between all of our crazy pavers. We had originally planned on concreting them all in, but with our tenant deadline looming, we gave up on that idea quick smart, and went for a high contrast white pebble to really play up the craziness of the crazy pavers. Reckon it worked?
The boys had the fun of putting in all of the pebbles while I slogged on with the planting, and they certainly played their exhaustion card too. Although it looks more like they're on a firing line here than relaxing!
So that was that! A loooong hard slog, and finally at least one half of the front yard could be considered done!
It looks just as good in the morning sunshine as it does by night. Whew!
So thank goodness, we're nearly there!
With downstairs, that is. There's still a mountain of jobs to keep us occupied upstairs. Like painting our kitchen cabinets, for one! That'll be a fun weekend!
Anyway, what do you think of our front yard?
