Our Next House Landscaping

    

    

    

    

    

       

Outside the Laundry

For some reason when I think 'Outside the Laundry' in my head I sing it to the tune of 'Under the Boardwalk'.

Well now that I've got that song running around in your head, I'll welcome you to what we knew as ‘the laundry area’. The area situated behind the garage, next to the laundry and water tank, and in front of the shed. This is what it looked like towards the end of the construction of the house, with our El Cheapo Retaining Wall along the left.

There are two things I want you to note about it at this stage:

1. The height of the ground here is equal to the height of the concrete in the garage; and
2. The ground itself was made up of a mixture of dirt and roadbase.

The problem? We wanted to pave that area, which as you know, requires a nice thick layer of roadbase as a solid foundation, and then a layer of sand on which to lay the pavers. It didn’t take us too long to realise that we needed to get rid of a significant amount of that dirt in order to have enough depth to prepare for paving (and have the pavers meet up with the level of the concrete in the garage).

No problem you say? Sure, if we hadn’t already hired earthmoving machinery previously and spent a small fortune on it. I put my foot down and said that we weren’t going to spend any more money hiring machinery, and that whatever needed doing we were going to do by hand. There was also the extra problem of having to get rid of the discarded dirt, which was going to have to happen one trailer-load at a time.

So, we found some websites where people advertised for delivery of ‘clean fill’ (i.e. uncontaminated dirt), and began digging.

And kept digging.

And digging and digging and digging and digging.

Allie took to sitting in the pile of sand/dirt that we were removing, as if she was trying to protect it.

This photo gives a good idea of the amount of dirt we got rid of. You can see the ridge of dirt just behind the wheelbarrow. We’d hand-shovelled the entire area up to that point.

The area on the left was to be a garden in the future, so obviously we didn’t want to prepare that area for paving. We barricaded it with star pickets and salvaged doors from Our First House, and relocated our pile of sand into that area.

Allie still protecting her sand.

The height difference.

Tom striking a pose next to one of the many full loads of dirt. As we took loads of crummy dirt away, we brought in loads of deco, which performs the role of both roadbase and sand, to get the area up to the right height again.

Make that several poses.

Allie and I also posing. Allie was actually the one that suggested this photo, since she takes credit for all of the shovelling done.

We had a few drainage issues in the area.

All of this digging happened fairly early on in the landscaping process – before we attacked the Front Yard. I can’t remember why we decided that the laundry area was a priority at that stage. We got all of the dirt dug out and replaced it with the deco, and then that was how it remained for almost a year.

Then we made the decision to move on to our next house, and we suddenly had a deadline to get the laundry area finished.

So, we decided to concrete the little area directly in front of the shed.

The patchy area you can see closest to the shed itself is made up of old bricks that we thought would be a good filler.

I had to hang out some washing while the clothesline was displaced, so got inventive.

Tom levelling out the final layer of concrete one night.

Wearing his home-made concrete shoes – plastic bags over bare feet.

Then we got some help in to get the pavers done (because we had to be very careful about the levels to make sure the drainage worked well).

These pavers are just 200mm x 200mm concrete pavers. They were actually one of the first landscaping-related things that we bought for the house, back in 2008. Tom found them second-hand on Ebay for $100. I kid you not, over the course of the construction and landscaping, we moved that darn pile of pavers at least six times! Maybe that’s why we were so keen to get the laundry area sorted out.

Here are Tom and Daniel preparing to concrete in another brick edging for the garden along the El Cheapo Retaining Wall.

Here’s the other side, more edging for a garden in front of the water tank.

We also discovered a mum and baby possum living in the garden shed. Allie wasn’t too keen on them.

The pavers were gapsanded, and then the plants went in, and the area was technically finished! Pardon the unsightly ladder along the right.

It’s very nice to be able to hang clothes out on the washing line without the chorus of “ouch”es associated with stepping on rocks.

The Final Frontier

Well actually not quite the final, and not exactly a frontier - it's our front yard. It certainly was our most major undertaking with the landscaping of Our Next House, and once we got cracking we got a hell of a lot of it completed very quickly.

We moved into our Next House in February of 2009. It took us until just before Christmas of the same year to get to the point where we were ready to start turning the front yard into something other than a mud pit. This was mainly because had piles of dirt and sand stored there that we had to get rid of first.

And then, true to style, we decided to set ourselves an unrealistic (but potentially almost possible) goal of getting the front yard looking pretty by Christmas. We were a few weeks out at that point.

So, hi ho, hi ho, as they say. First step was the not very satisfying but very important step of drainage. So we levelled the yard (shovel by shovel), and then laid the ag pipe.

The next step was to cover the pipe with drainage gravel. The issue we had was that there really wasn’t very much height difference from ground level at the front of the yard to the stormwater drain hookup at the bottom end. Therefore we had to try to get as much fall in the drainage as possible, so the yard would in fact drain.

We then brought four (or so) loads of dirt in over the top of the drainage, to try to give our new plants the best chance, and then I had some fun positioning all of the plants I’d gradually accumulated from the markets.

And then we planted most of the plants and mulched the garden.

Then it was time to move on to the other side. Again, we had to spend a fair bit of energy simply getting rid of the remaining dirt and rubble before we could start making it pretty.

Then we brought in more nice dirt (the sheet is to prevent the dirt going all over our pristine white pavers.

Tom showing his shovelling prowess.

Allie having a chat with the house mascot.

More drainage, this time under the media room window.

There were quite a few late nights getting this garden happening.

And then I needed to re-plan the little paved area we were putting in front of the media room. My initial plan wasn’t quite going to work, so Tom and I spent HOURS with graph paper and pencils working out possible options so we could centre the pattern and still have relatively consistent gaps between the pavers. This is the design that won out.

 

And then we filled in the gaps with white pebbles. I had really wanted to put some kind of greenery in the gaps between the pavers, but Tom wasn’t too keen on having to put dirt in amongst the roadbase and sand that gave the pavers a solid base, so we settled for pebbles. Perhaps a less dramatic look than the contrast of green and white would have been, but certainly not bad.

Then we could almost lay a few stepping stones to meet up with the path running along the north side of the house (along Our First Retaining Wall next to Our First Garden).

 

Looking up the North side of the house.

Looking across towards The Roundabout.

Another late night, this time mulching around the new plants.

The fully mulched garden. You can hardly even see the plants with all the mulch around them!

The stepping stones.

We bought a cheap metal archway to divide the front yard from the North side, and planted Chinese Star Jasmine to grow up each side.

The media room window.

And here is the garden a year or so later when we moved out.

The beautiful big Westringea Coast Rosemaries.

The view from The Roundabout.

Just in case you were wondering, we didn’t actually get the whole garden done by Christmas. We still had most of the media room side barren when Christmas Day hit. Nevertheless, we accomplished a lot more with that goal to work to than we would have otherwise. And then we spent our Christmas holidays getting the rest of the yard done. No rest for the wicked!