How it all started - From Lot to Landscape

This is how it all started….

After myself and DH got married I designed our dream home, we purchased a hillside lot with an ocean view and hired a contractor to build our healthy home design….Well it turned into a nightmare and to make a very long story short we had already sold our other house, were stuck in a tiny basement apartment and nearly lost our shirt on this contractor and ultimately lost our dream home.

The only way for us to get out of the mess was to build again so this time I decided to be my own contractor and I designed a small cottage style house to help reduce the loss we had taken with the previous contractor.

So we searched around and found a half acre wooded lot about 10km from our apartment…Nothing outstanding just a flat lot with scrubby alders, spruce and fir trees.

We cleared most of the lot ourselves and tried to save as many trees as possible although the excavators here seem to think its best to simply flatten a lot and then you can plant some lovely twigs to replace the trees they tore down…So needless to say it was a challenge keeping my trees…I did everything aside from tying myself to them to ensure I would keep as many as possible.

I designed and drafted the home, garage, septic system and plot plan. I Ordered materials, subs and did some minor labor like weeping tile and wainscoting. I hired DH to do to do most of the interior woodwork by buying him the Dewalt tools that he wanted…Turned out that I paid him a decent wage of about $1.25/hr :)

So as I said, the lot was flat…I am not a fan of flat lots so I had a vision of my house elevated 5 ft higher than the driveway…Boy was this a hard one for the subs to understand….Being a small female, I got the wink…smirk…look at your buddy…”You can’t have your foundation stickin outta da ground five feet me love” So I brought the plot plan and described to the excavator that we will remove the fill from one side of th lot and mound it up around the foundation…Scratches head, shrugs “whatever you want me love but you won’t like it…you da boss”…Smirk…wink.

So after the foundation was poured, the septic guys were just as baffled as to why my foundation was sticking up out of the ground…You’re gonna have some set of stairs to your front door you know…At this point I was just like…na…I have a plan…no worries just do your work :)

So the floor was on and we were ready to backfill…This excavator was a nice young fella who could pick up a penny with the massive excavator but still did not know how to backfill the house…I don’t get it, it’s simple but the problem is not many people here do anything different…split level house on flat or backdrop lot.

I spent the day with the excavator literally pointing bucket by bucket…dig here…fill there…dig here…fill there…dig here…fill there…dig here…fill there…then all of a sudden…The guy looks at me with a eureka look and says…AH..this is gonna look nice :)

Why can’t these guys just read plans …shakes head…

So on and on for 5 months and we finally moved into our new home in December….So no landscaping this year.

Next spring came and we were facing a muddy gravel lot with 45 degree banks of fill.

Myself and DH picked rocks and raked for most of that spring and early summer…shaping the lot. I called a local guy who had a farm he was excavating and ordered and tandem load of manure a five tandems of topsoil…”you don’t want a load of manure me duckie…that’s reeeeal stinky ya know” Yep I know…just bring it here.

Oh and DH built the garage and later in the fall a henhouse on the back.

So for the remainder of the summer we shoveled steaming hot shit and soil and gave ourselves about 8” of fertile earth. I seeded with clover then on to winter and the next year.

I spent this spring raiding friends and families gardens for anything they were throwing out, I removed the back seat of my jeep and almost daily came home with a load of sickly dried up dying plants…but they were free and needed a good home. I plucked plants from roadsides, dug bulbs from abandoned homesteads and salvaged junk plants from friends…I got a few decent plants by transplanting an entire garden of daylilies for one friend.

Spectators:

I had no real plan…just stuck them in anywhere. I started calling around getting prices on stone work…boy was I shocked…$15000 for half of what I wanted done.

The third year we planted some veggies and hired some local guys to build most of the rock walls…I ordered the stone and watched them…I finished off the rock work and stairs and continued to plant finds from friends and sale plants at the nursery…nothing more than .99 cents.

I designed and DH built the decks and wooden side steps to the garage, the garage deck and in the fall a bachelor pad for the roosters.

Front deck:

Old Make shift side step:

New side deck:

Steps to garage/henhouse

In three years we accomplished quit a bit on a budget ( I spent about $60 in plants and $120 for 4 trees)…This past fall we organized the veggie garden for square-foot gardening, I planted a bulb garden in our wooded trail out back and we moved a few plants that I decided needed a better place.

I think we came a long way in three years…now we may be doing it all over again on our new 5 acres of land…Whew!

-- Xploreorganics, 5b Canada, LFD 06-20