Another IKEA addition

Another month, another new piece of furniture added to the house! 

After a detour past IKEA on an airport pick up, I set my minions to work building my newest addition - an IKEA 'Hemnes' console table http://www.ikea.com/au/en/catalog/products/60251811/ .

  

Place it in the open space under our wedding canvases...

add some IKEA Knarra baskets http://www.ikea.com/au/en/catalog/products/40243313/ ... 

a mail and keys tray...

some knick knacks...

a few photo photo frames... and voila!!

A little more 'Nat flair'

Now that we're well and truly in and settled, the house progress has slowed dramatically. Sure we have the essentials, but the house is still quite bare, it doesn't have any Nat flair yet! I have so many plans to fix that, but unfortunately most of them require money, which means waiting and chipping away at each of them slowly as we can afford them. 

For a joint Christmas/house warming present, Ben's mom and Dad wanted to buy us a new rug for the lounge room. Hillory and I set out shopping earlier in the year and found an awesome area rug, at Nick Scali - the 'Larry' in grey, 3.0 metres x 3.5 metres: http://www.nickscali.com.au/rugs/larry.html. Although we bought it a few months ago, we kept it rolled up until Beans was well and truly toilet trained to avoid any accidents - it was pretty expensive after all! So now, with the cold weather settling in, getting it out has been well timed - it's pure wool so it warms up the room a lot and makes it so much more homey. Beans sure loves that he can lay around and play on the floor without freezing on the floor tiles!

The other addition to the lounge room was some 'RIBBA' picture ledges from IKEA: http://www.ikea.com/au/en/catalog/products/60191836/.  While we had the couch pulled apart to lay the rug down it was a good time to have my handy-man assistants, Ben and Grady, install them. I bought four of the 115 centimetre ledges and put them up in two strips, with two ledges (butted up end to end) in each strip, one above the other.

 

I had a specific idea in mind for the use of the ledges that I think I saw on Pinterest a while ago. So with that in mind, I've spent the last six months or so collecting a bunch of random, neutral tone picture frames in a mix of matte, metallic, patterned and plain designs, and filling them with all my favourite photographs. 

Once the ledges were up and the couch reassembled, I set about arranging and rearranging the frames on the shelves, fine tuning their positions, and blue tacking them in place, until I was completely satisfied with their organised yet haphazard layout. Perfect!

Still landscaping..

Since laying the turf and getting the basic fence structure up, the progress has slowed considerably.

Now that we didn't share a communal backyard with half the street, gone was the urgency that comes from having strangers and their dogs walking through your fence-less backyard at random times of the day. And subsequently also gone was the need to spend every spare moment working away outside.

There were however, still things to be done. So we slowly chipped away at it over the next few weeks.... Cutting down the turrets into a nice angle from the high fence to the low one, leveling the top of the palings, sawing off the excess fence posts etc. etc. And, of course, when I saw "we" chipped away at it... of course that essentially means "Ben" chipped away at it. I helped where I could though, any my part will come soon enough when the garden is ready for planting!

I wasn't sitting by idly though while this went on. I was working away getting inside organised. And so, my first project was the laundry.

Ben had already helped me install two cabinets beside the washing machine, they are just waiting to be completed with kickboards, doors and a bench top when we have some spare cash to allocate to the project.

I used a piece of cheap plyboard to create an interim bench top though and expand the working space.

The next step to maximise the limited space available in our little four metre square laundry was building up to the top of our glorious 2.7m high ceilings. I did this with some new shelving, and a really handy 'Grundtal' extendable drying rack I picked up for $40.00 at IKEA! No more dumping sweaty running clothes in the sink and stinking the place out for days on end, now we can hang them up to air, ready to go in with the next load of laundry!

I'll just need to stock up on some more of the matching IKEA 'variera' storage tubs to satisfy my OCD and it will be complete.

Next project to tackle was the front landscaping. And so, after Ben put the front gates in, we were able to dismantle our temporary puppy fence built out of the leftover sleepers and build the two level layout we'd decided on. A design that will look good but will be low maintenance.

 

A new addition

And so here it is... the reason for the rush on the final fence countdown.... our newest addition to the family.

Everyone, meet Beans Bravis!

Born on January 8th, we got him from a breeder up in Sydney and brought him home last weekend at eight weeks old, much to the cat's disgust. 

He's slowly settling in, and making good use of the backyard we put so much effort into. I just hope the grass can hold up to his antics and chewing habits!

Landscaping, P2

The retaining walls were definitely the most technical, and expensive, part of the garden. Due to the site cut, we needed one along the side and one at the back of the property. The side one was a lot more difficult because it needed to step up in height from the back of the property to the front. It took a few days (over several weeks), but in the end, the guys did such a good job!

Since this one won't be visible from inside the back garden, as its below ground level, we used plain treated pine sleepers. The bits of the 'H posts' (the sleeper brackets) that you can see sticking up above where the sleepers end will be lopped before the fence is put on top.

Once the wall was up we could start moving some of the spare dirt from the site cut into the space behind it to build the ground up to level with the slab. This meant getting a turn using the digger!!

 

After the technicalities of the side wall, the rear retaining wall seemed easy. That is, disregarding Ben's minor measurement malfunction - resulting in one section between two of the concreted posts being too wide for the sleepers we had, and requiring us to order seven more longer, more expensive sleepers to fit the gap and correct it! But other than that, it was pretty straight forward and the guys had it up within a weekend. 

 

Over the next week or so, the rails went up...

  

And then it was time for the glory run - time for the palings!

We have Ben's sister Katira and her husband Grady, from the USA, staying with us for six months on a working holiday in Australia. So while Tira is out being a sugar mama (Australian citizenship made getting work a LOT easier for her) Grady has been staying home earning his keep working on the fence with Ben.

Between Ben's two jobs and Grady's golf tournaments, they chipped away at it over a week or so, a few palings here, a few palings there, til all the standard palings were up.

And last of all, the extra tall palings went up at the end where the normal fence meets the retaining wall fence. We got them milled specially tall, planning to cut down on an angle from top to bottom. Since then though, life has got in the way... and so they still stand at a mighty four metres tall, towering over the rest of the yard like turrets on a castle!

Landscaping, P1

We've been in the house for three months now so I'm well overdue a blog update.

The place still doesn't quite feel like home yet - without many of our personal items unpacked yet (photos, decorations, etc.) it's still quite sterile. Our old place had a floor to ceiling (3.0 metre tall) built in bookshelf, and with all our books, photo frames, and decorations that we've collected from around the world it was the focal point of the living room (remember it was only a small townhouse). This house however, is much larger, and doesn't have any shelves to put all our bits and pieces or books on, yet! I have plans to change this, but of course it all takes time and money.

Our first priority has been the landcaping. After living in a dust pile for the last three months (which becomes a mud pile, with torrential mud rivers, every time it rains), and with everyone who walks past day or night able to see straight into our living room, we are well and truly ready to have fences for some privacy and a landscaped backyard to get out and enjoy.

The process has been slow going so far... very slow going! One of Ben's mates, who runs a landscaping company, helped us get started for 'mates rates', as well as this we've recruited various friends, family and work mates for their cheap labour (a Subway lunch and a beer at day's end is usual tender). However this meant working to fit around various shift and family schedules of our own and each of them.

First of all was the brick edging. This area encloses the lawn - a nice big area for outdoor games to be played and pets to run around on.

 

The guys installed the irrigation system at the same time as the brick edging, ready for the turf to go in on top. This unfortunately was a bit of a failure due to terrible water pressure, a problem we are still working on.

A couple of weeks later, we got stuck into the fence posts, pardon the pun, as the boys cemented  in all the steel posts ready for the fence rails and palings to go up in the following weeks.

 

Because of the lay of the land and the site cut, we needed two large sections of retaining wall - along one side and along the back. This means we had to use much taller fence posts, as you can see. The fence will sit 1.8m on top of the retaining wall which itself will be 1.2m tall at the highest point. We got the posts at 4.0m and we'll lop them at the top once its all in.

A few days later, we had the turf delivered. This was perhaps slightly premature - the site prep had taken a lot longer than expected! We were racing the clock all weekend as the turf lay drying out by the minute in the harsh Aussie summer sun. Luckily we had a lot of volunteers over the two days. Some not quite as experienced in the manual labour and landscaping realm as others, but all were a massive help!

 

 

When it comes to the heavy lifting and backbreaking labour of landscaping, even I'll admit there's just some things that guys can do better than girls (well girls our size anyway), but Caroline, Katira, and I were finally able to lend a hand with this section of the work. It was much to the disgruntlement of our muscles over the coming days though - who would have thought shovelling dirt around and rolling grass would be so hard? And being the middle of summer, it was hot work too!

Finally the site was ready... It was time for the glory run - the laying of the turf! With dark clouds bearing down ominously on us it was a case of all hands on deck, but we managed to get it done just in in the nick of time before the rain gave our grass (and us) its first nice soaking.

There's obviously quite a bit more to get done. So stay tuned for part 2 of this post!