My travels in 2008 were happy, exciting, rewarding and full of fun and activity.  Sometimes, coming home after months with family and friends, one can experience a ‘flat’ feeling and I’d determined that this wasn’t going to happen!  So I’d made a long list of projects to tackle.  The next few months wouldn’t be dull!  Now it was time to knuckle down and do some serious work after such a lovely holiday.

When I bought my home in September 2004, it was in excellent condition.  I didn’t live in it until September 2006 and neither did I feel the need to ‘do’ anything to it.  I really love it but, after two years, it was time to put my stamp on it.  With no intention of selling it, I could make changes that would make living in it even more pleasurable, rewarding, convenient and easy.  

Two things were beginning to irritate me!  One was the fact that the laundry was a room outside the back door into the kitchen.  The other was the garden itself, obviously perfect for my predecessors, but not perfect for me. 

I had seven months before I went overseas again, so I thought it’d be really easy to complete my plans!  Not so!  With such little jobs – by some builders’ standards – my jobs had to be fitted in between other, major, projects.  Sometimes the weather intervened.  Sometimes I was away, playing in croquet tournaments, or visiting friends, or having friends to stay.  Seven months flew by!

I thought I’d get a landscape gardener to ‘do’ the garden.  But this was far too expensive, so I decided to project manage it myself and hire professionals for the various parts of the job.  This meant that I could be the gopher and do some of the non-professional work myself which saved their precious time and my precious money!

Starting with the garden, I wanted to remove an ugly crib wall and replace it with a wooden retaining wall and planter boxes.  I started by asking a landscape artist to put my thoughts into a plan – and, happy with that, I then hired the necessary labour to make the plan into a reality.  This meant hiring someone to dig everything up, set the new contours, level it, make post holes, bring in top soil and take away what I didn’t need.  But before all that started, there were heaps of jobs I had to do to prepare for the arrival of the big machines.

This beautifully made five-burner BBQ on its concrete base, had to go.  It was exciting watching the TradeMe auction and to know that it was wanted and going to a good home.

And this crib wall, which seemed to me to be more suitable for a motorway than my tiny garden, had to go too. Not to mention the concrete pavers in front of it, leading to the BBQ.  The pavers found a very good home at the croquet club and the individual concrete cribs sold very well on TradeMe.

But first they had to be emptied of their plants and their earth, and stacked up to await collection.  

I may look happy but actually they were very heavy and November was particularly wet so getting the wet earth out of each one was a very slow process!

On the upper lawn, it wasn’t possible to remove the crib wall which retains the bank between me and my neighbour’s garden.  That wall was filled with small pebbles and was equally unattractive, but I thought I could plant it with trailing things to cover the worst of its appearance.  The stones had to be taken out, the earth from below put in and the succulents, extracted from the lower wall, transplanted!

I’d earmarked the bed running along the eastern boundary for vegetables.  It was covered in shade cloth with larger pebbles on top and planted out with roses.  I love other people’s roses, but don’t enjoy having them in my own garden, so all that had to go.  The roses found a very good home at the Russell Kemp Home in Whitby where some of theirs had succumbed to some unfortunate poisoning! And I was able to plant the bed with some colourful annuals to brighten the place.

The bed beside the house was going to become lawn so all the plants had to be moved to the bed under the silver birch at the bottom of the garden.

This bed was small and dingy, not helped by the size of the tree towering above.

So I set to work to encroach onto the lawn, dig up heaps of small tree roots and establish a much bigger bed.

 All the plants moved well from one bed to another and, under the tree itself, I planted some of the succulents that I had left over from the top wall.

The edges were perfected by the wonderful stone wall expert, Ken, and are now flourishing in their new home.  Although the fence has yet to be replaced!  A project for next year!

The very attractive pink curved bricks were going to have to be moved around to make room for the proposed new wooden steps up to the top lawn, replacing the awfully deep concrete ones that were there. Not easy to manoeuvre with a heavy washing basket!

The garden was beginning to look very forlorn and very messy!

And so, two months after returning home, I was ready for the arrival of the machinery.  Michael, an expert driver brought his digger through the only available access, by breaking down part of the boundary fence, and driving into the back garden.

And he set to work.

He created a very large pile of back fill.

Which he took out to the truck waiting on the road, using his Bob Cat.

The digger seemed to have enormous fun throwing large slabs of concrete (which had been under the BBQ) up into the air to break it up for removal.

And he created two drainage channels on the upper lawn to get rid of the water that was coming down hill from the neighbours’ houses.

He brought in a truck load of top soil for me to play with at my leisure!

And created an area for the new wooden steps that would be built to replace the concrete ones.

Finally it was time for him to start digging the holes for the posts that would hold up the new retaining wall and the planter boxes

So the earthworks were now complete and it was time to attack the quite revolting fence on my western boundary.

Goodness knows who built the fence but in New Zealand it’s called a Mickey Mouse job.  I know that in England it’s called a Heath Robinson job. Whatever you call it, it was shoddy and I couldn’t wait to see the back of it!  Apart from the fence, the concrete pathway added to the unattractive appearance.

The fencing material arrived.

My wonderful builder, Jon set up his saw bench in the middle of the lawn (such as it now was!) and work commenced.

A very kind friend, Gary, brought aggregate and bags of cement in his enormous ute through the garden fence with about half a millimetre to spare on each side.

And then he and Ken had a well-earned cup of tea and chocolate cake!

Jon, meanwhile, was doing a fabulous job with the posts.

And he and his ‘helper’, Ken, began to build the fence together. 

Meanwhile, I hired a man to cut the concrete so that we could lay electricity and water to the back of the garden behind the new fence.

With the fence and planter boxes complete, I set to work to fill the planter boxes with top soil.

And put some on the poor, suffering lawn surface in the hope of getting lawn seed to grow – hard to imagine in December in New Zealand!

Things were beginning to take shape.

Jon set to work on the boundary fence but sadly hurt his back at this point and so the work was taken over by the builders who’d just arrived to start on the kitchen.

The entrance gate to the back garden was moved slightly south and a new gate built which looked magnificent.
 
Dan, the Master Builder who’d done the renovations on the house just before I bought it (and won an Award for his work), began to build a new deck outside the kitchen to match the fencing and the deck outside my office.

Jon returned and built me some new steps at the very back of the garden so that I can get the lawn mower up and down between the two lawns.  He also built me two very useful compost heap areas and a third area for my worm farm.

Then he and Ken started to build the new wooden steps up to the top lawn at the front.

With the garden beginning to take shape and look rather smart, it was time to water blast the garden shed and give it a few coats of paint.

Ken, meanwhile, was repairing the damage done by the machinery coming in through the garden fence and expertly building a dry stone wall with rocks from the farm

He was lovingly rewarded for his labours with chocolate cake by my neighbour, Rose, who’s been a patient and long-suffering friend throughout the whole, noisy, process

With all the dirty work out of the way, it was time for Mike and Aaron to lay the new pavers.  But first of all they had to destroy the old ones.

Then they had to level the base course and sand.

It was amazing to watch the safe arrival of the pavers and to see the crane expertly dropping them gently down onto the car deck.

Each paver was, of course, immensely heavy but the guys made very light work of and they began to go down in place. The final result exceeded my wildest dreams! What a fabulous sight.

The pink stones for the wall were reset and they all slipped back into place beautifully. 

I could hardly believe the difference in the entrance approach through the new gate to the back garden.

It was time to put the water feature in place and turn it on, 
and put the garden furniture in place for those long summer days with time to sit and stare!

Meanwhile, and as if that wasn’t enough work for one seven month period, the kitchen renovations were also ‘happening’!

The son of friends of mine was at the end of his first year in Architecture so I asked him if he’d like his first ‘commission’ – to design my new kitchen.  He did a good job, including a visit to the Council to seek the relevant consents.

Dan and his team, set to work to demolish what needed to be demolished!  They started with the wall between the kitchen and the old laundry.

And then it was the turn of the old back door.

There were days when it seemed as if there were experts everywhere!  The electrician, the man to move the heat pump and three builders!

Cakes of every kind disappeared, as if by magic, at morning and afternoon tea time!

The new back door arrived and blended in very well with the new deck.

The new kitchen was lined, the new lights put it (six instead of the original one only) and painting began.

The old, and rather unattractive, yellow colour was replaced with cream to match the interior of the rest of the open-plan area.

The carpet in the dining room was lifted so that the flooring of the whole dining room/kitchen area matched,
the levels between the kitchen and old laundry were corrected as closely as they could be, and the new floor was laid. It was cleverly done to match the existing floor without destroying the bits that weren’t affected.

The existing washing machine and a new tub were installed.

And everything was hidden behind floor to ceiling cupboard doors.

With only a few days to spare, it was now time to head off overseas again! It seemed a shame to leave it all behind but I knew it would be great to come home to ...