Construction Timeline and landscaping

January 21, 2016 by lunar62 Leave a comment

So here we are one month after handover and settling in nicely.

I have updated our Construction Timeline flowchart which you can find at the top of the page or follow this link:

Construction timeline

Tradies are beginning to come back to work and hopefully our outstanding items raised at PCI will be completed soon.

Our driveway has been completed today. We went for the same driveway as they had at the Ambassador show home at The Ponds, saw cut concrete spray painted with a textured colour plus fleck. The concrete driveway was poured and saw cut in December then left to cure. Today they spray painted two coats of charcoal then one coat of grey and one of white fleck and topped it all off with a couple of coats of sealant.

Looking pretty good if I say so myself.

Previously:

Today:

1st coat:

2^nd coat:

2 coats of fleck – bit different to my sprinkles on the epoxy garage floor:

Sealant:

Ta da! Finished:

Meanwhile our thoughts are turning to the landscaping. We want to crack on with this from both an aesthetic point of view and also to protect the slab from water pooling.

We went with a split level house following the slope of the land whilst our neighbours raised their slabs. This means that when it rains heavily the run off tends to pool around our slab as we are lower. We have had rather a lot of rain in the New Year and could see where it was pooling. I ended up nipping out and digging a trench to drain it away in between showers.

Once the retaining walls and ag pipes are in plus some extra drainage it should no longer be a problem. Hubby has been out with fluoro string marking out different levels in the garden to give us an idea of what it will look like. The landscaping will be done in stages as we have decided to leave the pool until later when we have saved up a bit more to get what we would really like.

So first stages will be:

1. Side retaining walls, fences and gates plus rear retaining wall.
2. Raise rear garden then turf it plus finish rain garden.
3. RHS flower beds & rear hedge planting.
4. Add pebbles to side of driveway to ease parking (I’m finding it a little tricky parking – as long as I don’t end up in the swathe or knock down the front balcony pillar I’ll be right !)
5. Fancy letterbox (moved far away from my manoeuvrings on the driveway  🙂 . I’m rather fond on our cheapo temporary one from Bunnings but its not the look I’m after).
6. Turf front & side
7. Reticulation

Second Stage:

1. Pool and pavers
2. Tier side garden with retaining wall and privacy screen artwork
3. Create permanent drying area
4. Plant front flower beds once access for pool is no longer required.

Third stage:

1. Sit back and enjoy it all  🙂