Forty Three

While we still have some serious work to do to get the garden back, the view from my kitchen is really starting to come together. I love how the Jacaranda trees complement our wall, and the colours all pull through.

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I planted a garden today, and filled it with light. And yes, those are black flowers, they look like this

It is nice to have some flowers in the garden that I chose.

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A butterfly came to visit our garden today. This makes me happy.

We don’t have much of a garden at the moment, but have started planning out the garden, especially in the back of the property, where we envision some kind of magical blend between Legoland, Wonderland and Neverland, complete with pond and Lego figures in hidden corners.

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First photo from my new phone. Simply love this camera.

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Can you spot the creepy crawly?

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Mint and lavender

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Rose geraniums.

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A portion of a panoramic picture of our back yard. It is so nice and green now, and the jasmine is in full bloom too.

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All the pretty jasmine flowers.

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The flowers this year are a little slow in making their appearance, but I think it is mostly because we haven’t really had our rains yet. This is a picture I took 2 years ago, and is still one of my favourites.

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This is a before (January 2011):

And this is the after:

We've changed the face of this house quite a bit. And once the rains have been, the lush green will return too.

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I think this one is also a Lilly. I just think they're really pretty.

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Lilly

We’re interviewing Estate agents this week so we can get the house on the market.

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A year ago, the new lawn for our back garden arrived. Can’t believe we are ordering lawn again.

And yes, this is pretty much consuming my life right now, because we really really need to sell our house and move into something bigger.

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This is my favourite spot in the garden at the moment. It is lovely to sit here in the long Summer evenings, and with the new umbrella, it will be lovely during the day as well.

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Finally finished planting all the plants and seeds. Next step, order some lawn

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The start of the new flower garden in the front of the house.

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I planted a tree today. Actually, I planted two. This is the first step in the taming of the front garden.

Building the back garden

Before we started our renovations earlier this year, we had a fairly nice looking front garden, with a couple of flaws, but the back garden was just one big sprawling mess. We always had plans with the back garden, but other things ended up taking priority. After the renovations, there wasn’t much of a garden left, both in front of the house and in the back, and since we have decided to put the house on the market, we have had no choice but to finally get this space under control.

This is what the back garden looked like before the renovations started:

My biggest problem with this space was always the amount of concrete. I am part hobbit and love to walk around barefooted, but the concrete is hard on the feet. The rest of the layout has also been frustrating, and, just in general, the space did not work for me.

We (and by we, I really mean Quentin) have been working tirelessly to get the back garden into shape. First step was to build a small retaining wall, and fill in this space so we can cultivate a lawn. We did take a little shortcut, and purchased instant lawn, because of our tight deadlines. This made a massive instant impact to this space, and the rest of the bits just started falling into place.

Have also been reorganising the garden beds, replacing beds with potted plants and planting some flowers into this space.

Quentin has also started paining the house, and it is already starting to look much better. Can’t wait for it to be finished.

Now, we just need a bit of rain.

Next up, rebuilding the front garden.

The Big Build of 2011: A wall is born

Our wall build project is finally finished.

When we started this project at the beginning of the year, we had a vague image of what we wanted, but never thought it would turn out this beautiful.

As a reminder, this is what the front garden looked like before we started the project. The garden was lovely, but the wall, not so much.

The wall is finally finished, and all the trimmings, including our new numbers, are up. We were quite specific with some of the trimmings, and chose these beautiful LED lights recessed into the wall for down the driveway:

We chose a lovely blackberry colour for the outside, as well as the pillars and tops on the inside.

The last touch was the addition of our beautiful, hand made numbers.

I am not sure if I would ever tackle such a big build project again while living on the property. While the builder we used was absolutely wonderful, such a project still causes a lot of disruption in your day to day life and a vast amount of dust in the house.

Next up, we need to redo the font garden