resting on our laurels

HARDLY!!!

We've been in our home now for a few weeks and have all settled in beautifully!!!  We've been super busy with all the unpacking, shopping, organsing quotes, shopping, landscaping, shopping ;-) ....you get the drift!

Here's my youngest with his tool belt on feeling all important!

And here he is helping his Poppy put together a kitchen in the flat!

And did I mentioned we've been busy? Mainly thanks to a lot of landscaping that poor ol' 'B' is pretty much doing solo.  He's doing a cracking job though and it's going to look fabulous when it's all finished.  Though I definitely need to shout out a big thank you to 'B's' brother 'S' who was a huge help for a couple of days and 'B's' mate 'M' who is giving him a hand today!!

This is a before shot.  Swampy much?

And from another angle.  The weather was against us in the first week.

Here's 'B' carrying one of the many beams that will be part of our retaining walls.  He makes it look light!

And here he is with the kanga hammer digging holes for the posts to go into.  Each hole is 900mm deep and majority of them were through slate!  'B' now has muscles on top of his muscles!  If you've ever lifted one of these machines you'll know what I'm on about.

And in enters Russell and his excavator!!  Saving us, oh let's see, 1000 hours of manual labour!

Here he is out the front excavating our drive-way

Here's dedication for ya!  Once 'B' got everything out of the hole, he'd scoop the last out by hand to make a flat surface for the post.

You can see the excavated back yard here...

 

And wasn't it a relief to get a drive-way put in!  We had rain for the first week and it became so muddy.  Not great when you have a very independent 2 year old who was most put out when not allowed to walk through it when getting in the car!

We received 3 quotes for the drive-way:  $6200, $5300 & $4600.  Pays to shop around!

Its just plain concrete at the moment to match the existing section of battle-axe drive-way.  Once all the landscaping is finished, we'll clean it with a gurney and then paint it.

Yay for Dave the concretor!

Before you think it just looks like a whole lotta concrete, once the fences go up and we put our decking on the porch and landscape at the side of it (where the huge mound of dirt currently resides), it should look much nicer.  We also needed it to be reasonably big so we have the option of turning around when coming out of the garage.

On a final note, we had a few things to be finished off by Eden Brae after handover and I was naturally a little wary, wondering if we'd become yesterday's news once the house was officially ours and never hear from them again.  However true to his word, our Site Supervisor has continued to get some of the last few bits and pieces finished off for us since we've moved in, which has been terrific!!

If you're after a terrific concreter, call Dave from Ferral Concreting on 0415 221 001.

If you need an excellent excavator / bobcat operator, call Russell on 0418 220 372.