Channelling Pink Floyd in the front yard ...

... "all in all, you're it's just a - nother brick in the wall".

As shown in a previous post, we had decided to have the front retaining wall built out of leftover house bricks to use them up and try to save a bit of money on materials.

After wasting 6 weeks trying to find a bricklayer who would

1. actually answer their phone
2. agree to come out and give me a quote
3. actually turn up at said appointment time all
4. be able to do the retaining wall job sometime before Armageddon

... I finally gave up and called a couple of landscapers.

Then after going through almost the exact same process over two weeks this time, I found a young bloke who has just moved into our estate, turned up exactly when he said he would and gave us a reasonable quote, so I grabbed him with both hands (not literally!) and gave him the job.

Before he could start, Peter had the unenviable job of removing the last dodgy contractor's handiwork from the path to the front door.  It wasn't done properly to start with and the guys disappeared of the face of the earth after doing it so we Peter got out his pneumatic thingumajig and tried to break up the concrete.  Twenty minutes later he annouced he was going out to the local hire shop to get, quote "a proper jack hammer" unquote as his one wasn't big enough to do the job (so many jokes .. so little time!).  This is the end result of his venting his manly frustrations on temporarily unyielding concrete:

The landscaper started the front yard today and we've already run into a few issues.  I wanted to have the wall run across the middle of the yard to make it two levels (just to add a bit of visual interest), but when they started digging for the foundations, they found the stormwater pipe, electrical pipe and to top it all off, the phone cable running right through at the wrong heights.  As he explained it to me, I could have the wall where I wanted it but I'd just have all those pipes sticking straight out the front of my nice new wall.

I pouted and sulked and whinged and whined but eventually accepted that the wall would have to go right on the footpath boundary ... waaaah!  I do believe I heard the words "suck it up princess"  more than once from my darling husband, but chose to ignore him for his own safety.

Once that decision was totally taken out of my hands accepted, they got stuck in and here's where they're up to at the end of the first day:

Looking good so far ...