Front of house & garden - before and after

Here are the before and after pics of our little house and front garden!
The before photos were taken when we found out we had just had our offer accepted on 'The Crappy House'. This was the nickname we called the house when we were looking at it to buy.

Before



During
That's the huge skip bin which was filled with the contents of our front garden including the grass on the council strip to the left which was a hotch potch of different grass varieties and just never did well. We got a bobcat driver in and he just ripped everything to shreds, pulled trees out roots and all it was amazing but very dusty!

After




Before
The garden in front of the house was all mulch and broken roof tiles!!!




After
Now beautiful Sir Walter buffalo grass, stepping stone paths and garden beds with paved edges. Lots of space for William to play cricket one day.



Before
I didn't like any of the existing trees and plants they had in the front garden. There were palms, hibiscus, lavender, azaleas with a leaf disease to name a few, so we wanted to start again with a blank canvas.


After (see Minky walking down the path?)
As you can see, we painted over the mission brown soon after we moved in. It was everywhere from the window frames, garage trim, letterbox post, the railings up to the house... ahhh!



Before


During


After


Before


After
The magnolias are said to grow to 10mts in 10 years which should look lovely framing the driveway.

You can just see the baby lavender plants next to the buxus and our rose bush and frangipani trees.

We would like to get a little white bird bath to put in this garden bed which should look quite cute next to the house.

As you can see we've only mulched the right hand side of the garden beds and the beds against the house. (My car decided it didn't want to shift out of Park at the ANL nursery where Glen was getting more mulch yesterday. We've had to get my car towed to the Subaru Service Centre this morning and the trailer is still stuck at the nursery!)

We plan to put a white garden arbour in between the two beds with the stepping stone path leading to the front door. We will grow jasmine up over the arbour for some more greenery.


I can't wait till the Murrayas grow up into a nice thick hedge at the fence line!

We are trying to decide if we should put a white picket fence up or even just white picket gates to go across the driveway and the arbour when the hedges have grown a bit more so that William can't run onto the road so easily.
What do you think??? Fence, gates, just hedges?

So that's our little garden tour for today. It might not look like much but after all the digging, planting, painting and planning we are quite proud of the change.

I hope you have a great start to the week,