the house was done, we had the road fixed up and previously also landscaped the area east, south and west of the house. the one part we hadn’t been able to get to yet was the north side, the area right in front of the house. there were a few reasons: most importantly, since this was how everyone accesses the house we had previously stabilised the loamy ground using coarse gravel, which had to be removed before we could do anything else. and secondly, the paving had to be finished in front of the house.
the paving ended up taking a little longer than expected until kris had a friendly chat to the ‘master paver’ and impressed on him the urgency of this particular job. that helped, and the paving got sorted quite quickly afterwards. amazing. with this out of the way i could move on to the last bit of work: first of all the previously applied road base needed to be removed, as it would not allow us to grow grass over the top of it. we did want the area in front of the house to be mostly green, to keep the house cooler in summer and, frankly, because it just looks so much better than any alternative.
this meant i first had to scrape all the old gravel off, push it into neat piles, load it onto the tipper trailer (thank oma for that) and cart it off to wherever i would reuse it in the future. like the guest parking spot, which could do with another layer of road base to make it more resilient.
that little pile is probably about a ton and a half of material. i had the disco in low range all the time to reduce load on the gearbox; this did not make for fast progress, though. i got pretty good at loading up the trailer quickly and without dropping the material everywhere or bumping the sides or bottom.
i know it doesn’t look like a big area, but all in all it took me the best part of three days to shift all the dirt. i didn’t count the trips but i suspect i moved about 20 to 30 tons of material – not bad given the little tools at my disposal.
while i was at it i also prettied up the area in front of the garage using local fine gravel. it will make the surface not just look better but also nicer to step on and hopefully we will also drag fewer stones into the house, where they could damage the floor.
as i may have mentioned before, good top soil isn’t easy to find; we counted ourselves lucky that we were able to source some from our local earth moving wizard. he even screened it for us, and i was very happy with the quality. i guess we’ll see how much weed came with it, but that’s hard to avoid. we’ll just have to deal with it when it starts poking its head out.
it doesn’t look like much, but it took four and a half twenty-ton truckloads of top soil to cover the area, and about a day to spread all the dirt. all in all this was a week’s work – i can’t wait to see the grass grow. kris is already looking for a few shrubs to plant around the house, like bottle brush bushes, banksias, and maybe even some proteas or pepper berry bushes – we’ll see what wants to grow there. it will be good to have some patches of colour, and hopefully these bushes will also attract birds.
finally a tiny planet to bring it all together. i’m happy with how it all worked out.
we still have to build two bridges across the dry creek bed … next time we’re up there.