It may not appear much in the pictures but we have been
absolutely working our butts off to get to this stage! Every weekend that Alex
has been home we have spent majority of our time outside doing the landscaping.
Our turf was delayed due to the rain but now that we finally have grass, it
hasn’t rained! Hello empty water tank and massive water bill!
We went with a Buffalo grass - originally it was going to be Sir Walter but we changed our minds to
Sapphire, which is another high performance buffalo grass, after seeing, feeling it and hearing raving reviews about it. It is exactly like Sir Walter but is softer, greener and handles full sun much better than Sir Walter. We're super impressed with it and it is SO green!
The decks to our portico and alfresco are now complete and
looking amazing. We are letting them weather at the moment so they can be oiled
soon. Alex built our entire fence on his own (clever little man I have) without
ever building a fence before. We did hit a few hiccups but nothing too
difficult to work around. Our fence has been the talk of the street and they
all love it (with the footpath being on that side we have had quite a few
‘watchers’ during the process). The neighbours that are due to start
construction on their house soon want to build their fence the same way! We went with Merbau for our decks and fence simply because we love the look and colour of it - some would say that Merbau is too good to use as a fence but to be honest, we only had to build one side of the fence as the other sides were already erected. Also, the fence is along a foot path which, according to our building covenants, state that we can't have a regular 'divider' fence there so the Merbau worked out much cheaper than using Hebel or a rendered block wall (it's 35meters long!). The
fence will need to be oiled when we do the decks so we have a bit of oiling
ahead of us.
So for now we have decks, turf and a fence – still to come gates,
river rocks for the sides of the house, gardens and curtains! Oh and a retaining wall!
But first… a wedding to attend in Bali yew!