I'm still here! Outdoor Progress Report

Hi everyone, things at our place have been madness so I apologise for the lack of updates, but don't despair I have a ton for you now! I have decided to split this into two posts one for the outdoors and one indoors.

So here goes:

We have grass!! beautiful green grass :-) This was a little sooner than planned but we have an elderly gentleman who lives across the road who we named "neighbourhood watch" sometime ago. We received a phone call from council advising we needed to do our landscaping (10 days after we had moved in!) because they had had complaints from a "neighbour" that the dirt in our front yard was washing away....we hadn't had rain in over two months in Brisbane so I am not sure how it could possibly be running away but anyway...that aside we now have turf. If we had had more time we may have done the turf ourselves, but instead we decided to get someone in who could do the correct levelling and the hard yards for us. Have to say I LOVE it, it does make such a big difference to the look of the place.

The day before the turf was due I ordered a stack of stones to use around the spa area, without thinking that I needed to move them all from the front of the house to the back before the turf went down!! and Rick had to work so I moved an awful lot of stones that day 1.5 cubic meters to be exact, I don't recommend it at all!

We have stained our deck, that was a lot more involved than I expected, if you remember from my last post we purchased the deck staining kit from the Deck guys to do ourselves to save on cost. You have to do 3 different types of applications, the first requiring you to pretty much wear a hazmat suit according to the instructions, which on a hot day is not all that fun! It was a bit of a rush job as it was 2 days before our house-warming party. It looks a lot better since it has been stained, so glad we went with decking, I had thought about tiles or concrete etc. but you can't beat a deck.

I purchased a Lychee tree on the weekend just gone, but have to wait 3 years before I can expect fruit :-( I am currently in the market for more fruit trees and next on the agenda is a vege garden, weed the area along the back fence where the trees are, put in some more trees and mulch around everything to keep the pesky weeds at bay! We will eventually get to the left side of the house, still throwing around options, thinking a nice row of hedging trees and some sandstone pavers, with more rocks...getting the motivation to move more wheelbarrows of rocks is another thing!! Oh and a fence lol (getting 5 minutes to actually have a convo with our neighbours would help with that!)

Here are the progress piccies:

Rocks to move from front to back

You wouldn't think that small pile is 2 wheelbarrows full!

Before the rocks went down

With stones - I have since removed most of the weeds down the side but didn't have time  on the day .

We bought 1 x cubic meter of cheap $55 rocks to fill the area underneath and then 0.5 cubic meters of the pretty white rocks that  are $350 a cubic metre. 

There is water on the deck where it has splashed up from washing the rocks down - deck hadn't been stained in this pic. 

Levelling up the yard.

Looking out from our upstairs window

From the front

We haven't put in our brick letterbox yet, it is a lot more expensive than we thought it would be. The quotes I have had are around $250-300. 

I wish I had a video - you can tell by the bend in his tail how excited the kittens were by the grass and were running around like crazy, apparently  dirt just doesn't have the same appeal! - I know how they felt lol 

I have since put little white stones around the front deck (like in the displays) where they have to leave the gap  for the termite warranty - I forgot to take a photo!

Sorry about the blurriness I must have had something on my phone.