Turf

Saturday:

This morning the rolls of turf arrived. We didn't know what time they would come, and it turned out to be while we were still in bed! I put on ugg boots and a jumper over my pjs and went out to direct the guy with the little forklift. He got them up the slope of our front yard, but Tim still had to carry them one by one to the backyard - and they weighed at least 10 kg each. Some a lot more, it depended how much dirt was attached to the grass.

Tim took Aiden to his tennis lesson and I measured the width of the grass rolls - the website had said 45 cm but they were 60 cm! This threw out all my levelling/smoothing calculations and I spent the next hour moving more dirt around.

When Tim got home we got stuck into the turf laying. It took about three hours. The grass is mainly a two-roll-wide strip around the pool, with an extra area in one corner for seating.

Before:

Neat rolls waiting in the shade:

And after:

Doesn't it look great! I was getting sick of looking at bare dirt. There is more than you can see in that picture as it goes around three sides of the pool, and Tim had to do a lot of cutting to fit them around the curves so it was a lot of work. Tim did all the carrying and cutting, I just helped place them, but I was still utterly exhausted by the time we finished!

The bare patches next to the fence will be filled with tropical plants, but we should probably wait until there is no danger of cold nights so they have a year to establish before they have to deal with winter. You can grow select tropical plants in Sydney ok but it does get a bit cold for them in winter so not a good time to plant.

While we were still working outside the heater guy came - luckily I had warned him that we might be out the back and if no one answered the door to come through the gate. He replaced the bits that needed replacing so we have a working heater again - although I don't know if we'll need it, it was beautiful today and is going to be 28C tomorrow! It will probably get cold again for a little while though before spring really kicks in.

I don't know if the plants are worried though, we have beautiful freesias popping up all over the place:

And our little peach tree in a pot is in flower:

Spring is a beautiful thing.

Cold

Tuesday:

This morning the heater refused to turn on. We have no idea what is wrong, and the scanty 25 year old instruction manual offers no advice, but Tim will clean the filter tonight (it's out of my reach even with a chair, on the ceiling) and if that doesn't help I will have to call a repair man tomorrow. Arg, more tradesmen! So I was very cold all day except when I was working in the garden in the late afternoon.

The council man came to do final certification for our pool. He said everything looked fine, which is awesome. Now I wait for the paperwork and get my bond back from council - the bond was to cover if we damaged council property like the sidewalk while getting the machinery in.

Aiden and I built a little retaining wall on a sloping bit of ground out of a few of the rocks that came out of the recent digging. All the rock from the actual pool excavation was taken away, but there are still big rocks in every shovelful of dirt! Basically we're sitting on rock here. Most of the ones I'd dug up were thrown in the skip before I decided I wanted to keep a few, so I didn't have the best ones to work with and they may be too small to make an effective wall.

Update: cleaning the filter didn't work - getting a repair man but not until Friday! Brrrr.