an update

Now that you're all up to date with the wedding plans, I thought you might like to see how things around the ramshackle farmhouse are progressing. Be warned this post is photo heavy so have you got a cup of tea in front if you? Go and get one, and settle in over the long weekend.

Here is a look at the front of the house not long after we moved in, close up and a bit further back...

 

The jungle. Thigh-high grass, rickety old fence, absolute wandering mess of a garden, mostly all dead or half-dead shrubs, about five trees where only two should be and ivy creeping everywhere. Not to mention what was actually lurking beneath all that grass (concrete, scrap metal, plastic bags, general rubbish, ugh). 

With a lot of elbow grease, weekend after weekend of demolition and back breaking root-pulling and rock-picking-up, it now looks something more like this...

The addition of the 'west wing' has totally transformed the property. When we came here the western side of the house was actually the boundary of the paddock (i.e. no fence, just sheep rubbing themselves up against the house, and we'd have to keep that little garden gate near the tanks closed to avoid meeting a ram at the dining room window for breakfast). There was a stand of 14 cypress trees, amongst other dead fallen trees, which we demolished along with the little brick hothouse. Here is a view of the western side of the house soon after we moved in...

After ripping out the cypress trees, pulling out the 38 (!!!) tree stumps, spending hours upon hours of picking up roots, rocks, concrete, and metal, and then finally spraying it, ripping it, picking up more rocks/roots/rubbish and ripping again, then sowing...well you get the picture but just in case you don't here's a play-by-play of the action. Oh and we erected the mother of all fences somewhere in there as well. In 40+ degree heat. Around the entire house yard perimeter. Bah!

 Until we ended up (eight months later) with something that looks like this...

*Insert ooh's and ahh's and huge sighs of relief from me and Mr M*. We finally feel as though we are starting with a clean slate - things to do now are new things, not fixing up old mistakes or generally cleaning up other people's mess! I cannot tell you how happy this makes us - we did a little happy dance once the western wing was finally 'completed'...for now anyway.

The front yard has also had a bit of an overhaul. Here's what it looked like after we moved in, after we had battled our way through that thigh-high lawn...

And this is it now....

Here is the backyard the day we moved in...

And here it is now, after pulling out the fence, cutting off the piping around the wishing well, making the garden bed twice as big with extra rocks and topsoil, pulling out all the dead ferns and jungle-grass from said garden bed, mulching said garden bed, planting pretty plants and giving the camellias and lonely rhododendron a prune...

Some progress shots of battling through the jungle....(yeah that's Mr M mowing a strip of lawn in order to get our furniture in when we moved in)

And here is a shot of the backyard looking back towards the house from the sheds, across the garden bed which we doubled in size (originally it had the fence along one side, which we pulled out and added more rocks to make a bigger garden area).

We easily forget what the place was really like when we first moved in, but looking back through these photos has really hit home just how much we have done. But there's still so much more to do!! These first eight months are just the beginning...

To see more garden progress posts you can go here. 

Images by Emma Durkin for Cinderella at Brindabella