Site works in progress.....

Oh my goodness, sometimes it hard to tell how a place has changed over time when you see it every day, and our house is definitely a good example of that.

We're coming up 5 years here, and although it's not a show home or anything fancy at all, we've done quite a bit to it.

-front gate
-new carpet
-insulation
-heatpump
-HRV
-interior paint
-curtains
-deck cover

Next on the list was  concreting works/landscaping....and by concreting works I mean new footpaths, taking out garden, building a new garden, getting rid of trees.

I kind of thought that because I've married a shotcrete extraordinaire that this would be a piece of cake, and the concreting itself will be, but my goodness the prep work is dragging on. I think we've been chipping away at it on and off for about 6 weeks now and this morning when I walked out the door I was pretty much of two minds...'yay, I can see the light at the end of the construction tunnel' and 'oh my goodness, there's still so much to do, this is a disaster!'.

Here's some pics to show what I'm on about....

Real estate listing pics of the outside (about August 2011)

Some pics from when the deck was being covered by Joe the Builder and his apprentice Big Red in April 2014

Pics of the gardens that I've had going over the past few years, so on again off again.

The transformation begins....

I took these pics on the day I first started to move some pavers from the back to the front.

Thanks for the cheeky butt shot Dalls

This guy was kept run off his feel trying to get all the worms we were uncovering. He was so chuffed that his truck was filling up and he was really miffed when he went back a while later and they'd all gone. He was convinced someone had stolen them, totally didn't buy our explanation that the worms like to be in the mud and grass, not on a yellow, plastic truck 

My effort for one day...moving about 20 pavers...the big ones were really heavy!

Getting rid of crap day. So cool to have a truck to load it all on to

We decided to build a raised garden down the side of the property for two reasons. 1. cause I'm losing 2 other garden spaces and still want to have somewhere to plant veges (bonus that it's raised so I don't have to kneel down to weed anymore!) 2. cause we had so much soil that we needed to dump from digging up areas for concrete so this was a great place to dump it all rather than paying for another skip.

They weren't overly big trees but we couldn't get rid of these stumps without some stump busting. The price of that combined with the fact that pretty much all of our fences are leaning due to tree branches and roots means I'll probably never plant a tree in my life!

These 2 had a great axe cutting tutorial together one afternoon. Was so cute to hear them spending quality time together

Lucky for that headlamp some times. He's probably done about 5 late nights where he can only keep going because of that little thing

And here we are today!!!!!!!

The skip has been picked up, another one is coming. Maybe the first of 2 concrete pours will happen in about a fortnight...I'm hopeful!

Completion pics to come...hopefully sooner rather than later!

And btw, next on the list after this is finally over is exterior paint but I better not start talking about that to my amazing hubby just yet.