Lawn

The lakes district

Garden edging done

Excavation and soil moving

Back in November last year we got our act together and started our lawn. We moved a mountain of soil (20 cubic metres) and then planted and watered and watered and watered the seed. 

Not scared at all of the kanga digger thingie

We have some green grass growing

Trying to keep the dogs off the patchy grass

First mow

This is how it's looking now. Pity the dogs' pee is burning it :(

Our summer veggie garden

Our veggie garden has done very well since I lasted posted. We've certainly had a good harvest of zucchinis and tomatoes this summer.

Butternut Pumpkins

Zucchini

Mini Eggplants

Veggie Garden

Love how it has turned out. Not sure if it'll get enough winter sun even though it's on the north side of our house, if not, it'll be a great summer veggie garden anyway!

We used ecowood for the garden beds, a non-toxic treated pine. We lined the bottom of the beds with newspaper that got covered in a layer of straw, dirt and a mix of straw, chicken and alpaca poo went on the top.  We've planted baby beets, broccoli, bok choy, celery, carrots, peas and herbs. 

A shed, a hole and a gate

We finally got the shed up in October! Hooray!

Goodbye view from my laundry window

Ready to go

Half way there

Finished!

We also made our side fence and gate. 

We're really happy with how it's turned out. 

Hiring this hole digger made things much easier. 

Until….

#@!%!
Yep. There's the storm water pipe.

Where has the time gone?

Wow! I can't believe that we've been in our new home for 7 months! The time has certainly flown.

Our front garden is coming along - not that we've got lawn yet but the garden beds are looking good, just need a few more plants and they'll be done.

Still gotta get rid of that big lump of concrete on the nature strip - courtesy of the concreters...

We used some C grade railway sleepers to make our letterbox. Love it! And of course Mark just had to buy a chainsaw so he could cut down the sleepers ;-)

We've been busy building an aviary over the past few weeks. It was ready for birds yesterday so we bought two baby budgies. We'll buy some adult budgies soon so Cam can start breeding them.

A few cosmetic things left to go and it's all done.
At the moment the cockatiels are in a cage inside the aviary.
They'll have their own section in the aviary when Mark builds 'stage 2'.

Hiding amongst some of the timber we were using
for the aviary, we found this tiny little rabbit.
We moved him out to the reserve but he came back.
Hopefully our dog doesn't find him.

Our shed is almost up. We had the slab poured for it last week. The boys are loving having a basketball court and scooter rink.

We're still waiting for the NBN - meanwhile we have to use wireless internet which at times can be extremely slow, and no home phone yet either. We were told November, but now it seems like it'll be later than that. Grrrrrr #firstworldproblem

moving into the 21st century

We are in the dark ages at the moment... lol - our estate is all set up for the NBN, but it's not connected yet, and won't be until at least July (or so they say...). Since the developers have everything ready to go for the NBN, Telstra won't put in the old fashioned copper cable so we can get internet and a home phone. So at the moment we are paying $$$ for wireless internet which is why I haven't posted any more pictures lately.

We've made a start on our front garden and can't wait to get some more plants to put in. We hope to get some grass growing soon too, but that will wait till after we've got our shed in.

Two Glauca Pencil Pines and three Pascali Standard Roses

We got ourselves a new lounge suite for our theatre room. It's sooo comfy, we love it! It was delivered in several large boxes which the boys thought were fantastic and quickly used them to make a shanty cardboard town in our back yard.

The card board town the boys made.
They even made a kennel for Lottie and her friend Toby!

It took a few weeks for these fellas to turn up. Thanks to the recent fires there was a back log of bins. For about four weeks we had our rubbish stacking up in our garage, some of our rubbish we were able to put in a friend's bin thankfully. Thanks to the rubbish that we had to store in our garage, we had to invest in some mouse traps. We have caught 19 mice so far in our garage. Half of which were caught in the first day! Two were caught in the one trap at the same time!!! Thankfully we think they're all gone now, the traps have been empty for almost two weeks now.  

I plan to take some pics soon of the inside of our house, now that it's mostly sorted. But they might have to wait for next months internet usage quota before I can upload them on to my blog...

Mud and Blessings

Well we are in. So never, ever, ever, never want to move house again!!! I'll post some photos of the inside of the house once we're a bit more settled and unpacked - thank goodness it is school holidays now!

Yesterday we had our concreting done.

They came back yesterday and by mid morning the first concrete truck had arrived.



It started to drizzle just as they started the pour.

Looking at the radar it looked like most of the rain would go below Riddell...

By the time the second concrete truck arrived it was pretty constant light rain.

By the time they were doing the second lot of smoothing, the rain was pretty constant, not heavy, but enough to mess with the look of having smooth plain concrete.

I joked with them that spotty concrete would just have to become the new trend. They told me that in weather like this they can't smooth the concrete properly so they would have to do exposed aggregate. He had had a mix of pebbles put in just incase the weather turned sour. So we now have beautiful exposed aggregate instead of plain concrete. So very blessed.

Even though it is incredibly muddy now around our home, I'm not complaining, if it wasn't for the rain we'd just have plain concrete and a dry backyard, but thanks to the rain, we have lovely concrete and mud!