An outdoor horror story.

Home ownership often comes with lots of unexpected surprises and today I thought I'd share our little horror story about our overgrown green and leafy backyard full of furniture and pots.  We could tell that the fence and retaining wall were falling over when we bought the property and soon discovered that the tree and vines were pulling down the retaining wall and fence and vines were growing everywhere, including into the roof.  This was starting to lift up the roof and causing the fence to fall even more. Then the side brush fence was leaning on the house and there was an inaccessible shed and a small rainwater tank in the way. Near the plunge pool was a very large hot water heater that didn't work. However, most disturbing of all was the fact that there was a gas pipe going through the brush fence!!!
With all these scary facts, we realised that this meant we needed to take immediate action and sort out the backyard but stripping it back to its core and putting up a simple stable fence and retaining wall. Sounds easy enough right? Well this project has been going on since the start of January and was finally finished last week!

The elderly lady who sold us the property left behind all her old outdoor furniture, random statues and a whole lots of pots. To make a few extra dollars for the renovation bills we sold off most of these items except a few special bits and pieces that I thought could be used in future plans.

From these photos you can really see how the fence and retaining wall were collapsing, the small rainwater tank, the huge excess plant growth and the big fat heater.

Well what a crazy process this has been. Three large skips later we had cleared away the fence, pulled down all the extra plant growth and cleared over 40 tonnes of dirt. We also dug up a path of pavers and moved the gas pipe so it was no longer going through the fence.
It felt like the project dragged on for months as everytime we felt a little bit closer to finishing a section we'd run into another problem. We also had to live with no access to the garage for a few weeks. We blew our budget a bit but once the project was started, we knew it needed to be completed.

Progress.....

 The day the retaining wall was put in was a great day as it finally showed us some progress and now we have a finished fence and retaining wall.

Wooohooo! Now we have the basics sorted and a clean backyard space we can start to get creative and make it our special space. I have a lot of plans though a few of them will need us to save some more money before these can happen.

I purposely didn't plant or sell off this collection of pots and plants as they are going to make up the start of our new garden. I will probably sell the pots but plant the plants around the retaining wall. If you have any interesting ideas for what I could do please leave a comment or send an email. I'm a bit stuck as what I should really do.

And of course Maisy loves her new view too, although the pool fence does mean she doesn't currently have any access to the area :)

Lisa x