These photos show that I’m starting to make progress in the front yard. Finding the time is the hard thing.
Before
Not quite so before
Today
Before
Not quite so before
Today
Jayne’s painting everything cream to match the window frames. It makes a big difference to the house (front and back). Looks quieter, calmer, more set back. No idea why.
I’ve been removing fenceposts at the rate of one a weekend. Slow going. With three to go I’ll be done later this month. Anyway, here are some more photos of the front garden with the fence removed.
I just entered myself for the Melbourne Half-Marathon on 12 October. I’ve never previously run more than 8km in one go, but I’m running The Tan in 18 minutes (best time four years ago was 15.30), so I figure with a bit of training I’ll make the distance OK.
Stay tuned … but note that most of the updates will be on martinjy.com.
(P.S. If you read martinjy.com and this blog sorry for the double post. I decided it was relevant to both blogs!)
Ages since we’ve written anything. Did you miss us?
We’ve been working, sleeping, working, sleeping during the week, and gardening most weekends. I’ve started on the front garden, while Jayne has been concentrating on planting out the side part of the back garden now that the balcony’s done.
The plan with the front garden is to preserve all our beautiful shrubs, trees, bulbs and groundcover whilst completely remodelling the whole thing to create a more welcoming streetscape and an obvious entry. As you can imagine, those two goals are at odds with one another, so some of the plants have gone to the big skip in the sky, and we’ve moved others to the back garden.
I’ve almost finished removing the weird half-fence but I still have 4 fenceposts to pull out and they’re like icebergs: 2/3rds of them are underground. It takes about an hour to get each one out with the sledgehammer and the shovel. Last weekend I seriously considered hiring a mini digger to ram them instead. Anyway, when that’s done I’ll move some earth and put in some simple retaining walls to create some levels, put up a new fence that follows our boundary, and probably remove some lawn and replace it with shrubs and paths. Haven’t decided for sure on that last bit though.
It looks much better without the half-fence, and it’s easier to picture it finished. Glad I decided to take that out first before putting in the new one. It means we can’t let Maxy out there to do his business but he goes in the backyard instead. That’s not ideal because he tends to go find a bone and forgets all about going to the toilet. But never mind.
More pics when we’ve made more progress ….. but here are a few to be going on with.
…I’m fiddling with the jayneandmarty.com site theme, so watch out for big orange blocks of content this evening.
* 7.47pm: All done. Hope you like it.
** 7.52 Correction: Have to fix some stupid Internet Explorer bugs. Expect more orange blocks for a few minutes.
*** 7.56: Done.