Thread: havabeers front/backyard reno's

as you can see from the plam of attack photo rear access is actually pretty tricky as there is no decent way to get a machine in, as the backyard is already on an existing rock retaining wall. in the end we took the fence down and the operator just kind of dug him self a ramp and drove in.

this rear access problems also gave us issues trying to get stuff in and out as we had to use the neighbours drive way.

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so making a mess of the backyard seemed to be the easy part. we did have rain on and off that didn't help anything.

we also decided to drop the exisiting height of the yard by 400-ish mm to help level out the rear part of the yard. at the rear and side we put a 3 sleeper high wall just to raise the new fence up and try and ease out the battered slop a bit.

If we could do it all again (and money wasn't an issue) i'd go back and replace the existing rock wall we a new one up the height to flatten the whole yard.

the other cost was having to get EVERYTHING brought in via bulka bags, lucky old mate got the slightly bigger machine to be able to grab them straight off the truck. we actually did the local landscape place out of bulkabags but they where an extra $20 or $30 a bag added up quick


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That is no cheap project, looking good

eventually got the concrete sealed with the nu tech pave coat. This stuff was great at out last house but having issues with it lifting at the this one. Another problem is we didn't put an oxide colour in the concrete this would have helped hide and chips or flakes.

also did the sleepers as we ended up not really being a fan of the charcoal colour they come as. also paiting the Gal H posts monument as well

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I agree with Ray. A lot of work too.

Regards
Paul

and this where some problems started

so we obvisouly intended on turfing the back yard. where the main issue came up was the getting a decent amount of underlay into the backyard. the land scaper had already gotten the machine out by this point and a few large rain events had washed a whole bunch of the 20mm (if i was lucky) of underlay out.

so the only solution was a manual one I went out and bought a 2nd hand barrow and I moved about 16 ton of dirt into the back yard using a wheel barrow and some 70x45 timbers as floats. This took about a month. In the end I could move about 2T of dirt in a day, but I couldn't just do a solid 8 days of it due to work, life, kids etc. The yard never really got perfectly level either but the turf also plays around with it.

I'd basically put 4x 3m timbers down to make a big rectangle about 2m wide. I'd come and barrow down the dirt and roughly spread it
screed a 2.4m across the top to level it
walk/heel it in
spready more dirt to fill in all the divots
use the screed again
walk on it once more
sprinkle bit more dirt on top and spread/level using a level lute

in short
a nightmare


I really should have gotten ALOT more dirt delivered before the landscaper finished up


My original intention was to just throw the turf down on top of the exisiting stuff and hope for the best, a few mates convinced me with "once that turf is down, you can't just pull it back up to fix it so might as well do it right the first time". which is true, it was $3500 worth of turf so did it properly and gave it the better chance of actually surviving.

the wife also wanted a couple of small garden beds and we put a sand pit up the back as well.

but as the old saying goes, grass then beer you're in the clear

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Eventually it all greened up and we put a smaller garden shed in the back corner. The turf still needs to be top dressed and levelled. REALLY considering a robot mower, this once a week business is crap.

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You have certainly proved if a job is worth doing....do it well.....an awesome project you will never regret

I kind of forgot to update this with some of the front yard stuff


I don't really have AS many photo's of the front as I do of the back.


so the main idea for the front yard was to try and open it up so we could get a few more car's parked in there. Made a deal with the wife that I get the double garage as a work space. the small garden shed was going, the exisiting sandstone rock walls needed to go, and we where going to install new sandstone BLOCK walls as far back as we could.

we where also long past the "couple of weeks" mark the guy told us he could get it done in, and basically once the digger was out of the backyard it wasn't going back in. So things where dragging on.

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so began ripping everything out

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digger came in and worked its magic again.

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so we where kind of hoping the power supply to the house was buried a bit deeper then where it was. But of course it wasn't. so right at the finished height of our 2nd tier of wall was the mains incomer. the line runs down the power pole out the front and basically straight line of sight to the meter box. was buried enough under the existing retaining wall and concrete slab it didn't help our plans.


Ended up having to get a lvl 2 eleco out to sort it. In the end we dug around it as much as we could, to the point the eleco could come in, disconnect, run his new pillar box, cable and conduit behind the new wall in a day. had similar issues with water and phone but they where sorted a lot easier as they pretty much stayed in the same location. We did have to jutt out the wall a bit to give enough room for the new pillar box to go in which didn't gel too well with the wife but it is what it is.

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blocks went in fairly easily

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concrete was formed up and poured not too long after. I can't believe I haven't got a picture laying around of how it currently looks with the concrete actually done. Will get some up in the next few days. Which isn't too exciting as its still no where near done.

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reserved for updated front yard pic

So between the last lot of back yard photo's and now I actually replaced the chainmesh fence. It was just cheaper and easier to replace it with chain link, but went the black coated stuff, also painted all the post's black as well. at the same time got sick of looking at the unfinished part of the yard between our wall and the fence line. Colourbond would have been our first choice, but it was $3500 just in materials (with out any digging or concrete) vs $800 of chain link and $150 worth of paint.


so went and got a few bags of soil, mulch and some small grasses to put in there

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Originally Posted by havabeer69

Ended up having to get a lvl 2 eleco out to sort it. In the end we dug around it as much as we could

just get some string and turn it into an over head power run, she'll be right, thats what they would do in thailand.