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pdlouche
Yes, lots! Will try and dig out some pictures. Have spent the last year landscaping around the house, after the house build the plot was completely destroyed, piles of rubble everywhere, a massive trailer full of asbestos, and nothing but an acre of mud! The biggest issue we have had is that the house is actually sunk into the ground a bit compared to the rest of our land, and the ground round here is completely clay for around 4m deep, so drainage is a bit of a nightmare. Because of this we have spent a lot of time digging down around the house and then using gabion baskets to make retaining walls, and digging in drainage all over the place.
Front garden has now been in place for about a year and is really taking shape, lots of roses coming out in flower alongside every random plant my wife gets her hands on, we have a lavender bank next to the drive to try and attract as many bees as we can.
The side garden where we had our mobile home whilst we renovated has gone through its third iteration: gone from our house, to the kids play area and has now settled into the veg patch, we have 8 veg patches, green houses and a few fruit trees which are showing their first bits of fruit this year.
Back garden has been the main thing for the last six months. Spent most of Nov and Dec building a composite deck around the back of the house, giving us two decks with seating area and a walkway connecting them to the garage and log cabin we have as well.
I’m the middle of the recent dry period, we finally got turf down in the back, makes a massive difference having some green after two years of mud!
Next to the new lawn we have built an all weather play area for my daughter, artificial grass with swings, trampoline etc.
The next big project is the workshop out the back, I recently bought a artic lorry trailer, cut the axles off and dumped it on a hardcore base as a dry storage area, next step is to build a tractor shed in front of that as well as a little workshop to tinker around in.
Then in the autumn I have to try and sort out the back half acre of the plot, I borrowed a 13 tonnes digger for a couple of weeks, so cleared the ground and built some banks all around, I then spread around about 200 tonnes of 30 year old cow muck to supplement the horrible clay, this has now grown some very high weeds, so this will need spraying, raking and rolling in the autumn before we seed it.
After that the only projects left are trying to sort out the driveway, which is currently a mix of compacted scalpings, old cobbles and mud, but that is going to be a nightmare to sort, and will take hundreds of tonnes of hardcore to level I suspect.
At some point I will also look into have the old cow shed that is left standing made into some sort of freestanding bungalow, either as a holiday let or for family to use.
So lots of things happening, but still some pretty big stuff to do!