In between all those big jobs and the regular garden maintenance for our many clients, we also managed to fit in a few smaller jobs as well in 2018.
This was the last landscaping job we did in 2018, a great mixture of concreting, paving, raised planters and of course planting.
The design was done by another local designer, we ended up changing a few things around to better suit the site and the client. At the end of the day a plan is great, but if it doesn't quite work you should always be able to change things so things do work. This was our biggest project for 2018, turning an unloved lawn area into a beautiful formal vegetable and herb garden with 8 raised planters and several gardens at ground level.
The area was excavated and backfilled with basecourse, and before we built the planters we installed pipe work for irrigation. Premium grade macrocarpa was used for the planters, and macrocarpa was also used as garden edging where food crops are grown. Every garden has dripline irrigation with a tap in each one to allow complete control over watering. This was a great project to undertake, the design was fantastic and the end result speaks for itself. For these clients we installed gobi blocks to create extra parking space in front of a bed and breakfast. The blocks have a hollow in the centre, which is filled with soil and grass seed, this gives a firm surface to park vehicles on, but also allows for some grass to grow, to soften the area.
One of our regular clients asked us if we knew who would be able to build them some basic stairs from their driveway down to a paddock....
Of course we did. This was probably the trickiest job we had in 2018, building a timber deck over an existing concrete patio/ramp, and paving an existing lawn area.
The challenging parts of this project were the fact that nothing was level, straight or square, so a lot of measuring and levelling had to be done to get everything to work together and look good when finished. I think we definitely achieved that! Another first for us was building a limestone rock wall to edge a new driveway.
Many rocks were used for this, and a really nice added challenge was making two steps, they turned out very nice! All credit to Patrick and Ed for getting this project done beautifully! So the saying goes, so when we were asked to build a jetty, it shouldn't have been a surprise.
Lots of fun building this, especially an unintentional swim halfway through the job! In February we did a major make over in a backyard in Napier, most of the work was building a brand new deck to connect the house to the garden, and add outdoor space to the dining room.
Pavers were lifted and re-used, and the gardens themselves got a few new additions as well. The wall at home was a good warm up for the first job of 2018, more retaining walls!
These two walls were built to create as much flat space as possible on a sloping site, and a lot of soil had to be moved to make this happen. No machine access, so everything had to be carried in by hand, and moved by hand as well. |