'Cordova Two' with McDonald Jones: Our Home Our Dream: It's All about Landscaping

A house is life-less without its landscaping. Looking at the speed of construction, it seems we may get the keys sometime in November, latest December. So, we decided to look at the landscaping aspects of the house from now.

We met with our potential landscaper on site this week-end, discussed few changes on the original landscaping plan we submitted to council earlier. He also provided some useful suggestions.

Here are the changes:

Wheelchair access to Patio from Driveway: need to replace a meter from the existing garden-bed in the plan with concrete. This is a condition for HAF rebate eligibility

Cordova Two: Patio Access from driveway

Pebbles & Stepping stones instead of turf for the side: Picture below

Cordova Two: side of the house

Concrete under front Eaves instead of turf: so that the turf won't touch the walls
Concrete replacing a part of Garden bed: to allow access to left side of the house
Extending Alfresco with composite decking materials: Planning to extend the alfresco

Most of the above items are self explanatory. However, the decision on Alfresco deck is not final yet!

As the construction progresses, we felt the alfresco is quite small for our need. And when we consider installing a BBQ station and Basin in future, it will even feel smaller. But not much can be done about it. So we are looking to extend the alfresco area using decking materials as an alternative.

Some samples along with our alfresco is collaged below:

We already have the service area (Garden water tank and Aircon box) in the backyard as shown the the picture above, which we plan to hide using some garden screen and vining plants. The deck extension will be maintaining the same length of this garden screen (i.e. service area). We learnt, as this is still inside the Gutter area, there won't be any special permission from council required for deck of this size.

The Alfresco will be extended on two sides (0.8 meter until service area at the back and 0.4 meter on the side): giving us 4.4 sqm of additional space, no roofing is considered as the deck will under eaves anyway.

Hope this will give us slightly more room without losing much of the backyard.

We are also thinking of using composite decking material which is low maintenance compared to wood and would prefer a dark reddish tone like below:

And at last, I wanted to include all the plants those will be added:

Front-yard:

'Callistemon Little John' and 'White-Anzac-Bottle Brush' for the flower bed between Driveway and path led to Patio
Purple Tick Bush at sides and front (for hedging)
NSW XMas Bush on the left side of the driveway
Native Frangipani on right side of the plot

Back-yard: we opted for a plain simple backyard because of 1.5 meter drainage easement restriction