The area is cleared, the garden shaped (7 January 2006)

Yesterday we had SO much fun!! We hired a mini-excavator (like the one we used to dig the shape some months ago), and a 'dingo', and with Matt's help we cleared the 2 mounds of clay and dirt that were piled up from my many days of digging. Whilst he broke these mounds and moved them to the back-garden using the excavator, I used the dingo to move all that dirt into a 15 cubic meters bin that got delivered to the garage entrance. As you can see from the photos below, 15 cubic meters of earth are a LOT of stuff to move, so it took us the whole day to do that. Then today (Sunday) I kept the dingo and used it to shape the garden beds into a more 'oval' shape.

One of the things I had to do on Friday as a preparation for the Big Day was to destroy (demolish) the porch at the back garden; as I may have mentioned before, this porch was too small to be usable for anything except decoration, but large enoug to make a material difference to the final size of the garden; so, we decided to get rid of it and make the garden a bit bigger. Unfortunately the 15 cubic meter bin was not large enough to take the earth AND the wood from the porch, so I have my work cut out for next Sunday: I'll have to hire a Ute, and take all that rubbish to the tip.

Next steps:

1. Take the rubbish to the tip and clear the working area
2. Clear the clay that fell on top of the concrete foundations
3. Lay the bezel blocks for the retention walls
4. Get the road base delivered and lay it on what will be the paved area
5. Get the top-soil delivered and lay it on the garden

I am so excited! This is starting to take the shape it will ultimately have, and I can see what a massive difference it will make!



A triumphant stance having finished to put all earth in the bin


Using the dingo to shape the back garden. I regained at least two meters
of area just by doing this.


More dingo fun!