Villa renovations re-commence!

The villa renovations got credit crunched for a while, but are now resuming, yeahhh!

More on that later. First of all a quick update on what has been done since my last post.
As it hasn't been possible to do much work on the house itself, I shifted my focus to the garden. It's something I can tackle sporadically in nice weather, between work commitments, etc.

The Landscape Plan

I'd like the garden to look nice, but don't have the know-how or skills to figure out a "look". I don't know which plans like sun/shade/etc. and guessing at it means a lot of dead plants!!

So I got Ace Landscapes to draw up a landscape plan for me:

Above: The Landscape Plan.

It's about 95% perfect, and I now have a plan to work to. The intention is to work on it, one small area at a time.

Preparing The Canvas...

But first of all, it's been a matter of preparing the canvas, so to speak. i.e. clearing out all the stuff we don't like, to make way for the stuff we do want.

Above: the garden before the big tidy up: note the big pile of old branches etc. at the back.

Above: branches etc. have all gone! We filled up a massive skip (or "jumbo bins" as the kiwis call them).

And now, to keep the garden neat and avoid the build-up of more branches, palm leaves, etc. I've got a Sunshine Garden Bin.

It's a big wheelie bin that gets collected every 4 weeks, and it's less than $10 a month. They take away the garden waste and then recycle/mulch it, so it doesn't go to landfill. They don't take bamboo or flax, but we don't have any of that, so it's not an issue.

The challenge will be to keep the garden neat and weed-free over winter!

There's still more clearance work to be done before I can do much planting. Specifically, there are old tree stumps that need to be ground out. But that's a job for another day!