Fenced off and walled in

Fencing continues on Friday and the following Monday. In between we reduce the height of the wall between us and the house behind by knocking off four courses of bricks.
Then a pause in proceedings before a big day last Friday. Brickie comes and closes the gap between us and the other building site, fencers came to cut the fence on the other side to the prescribed height.And a nice man from Uretek comes to inspect the side wall of our Little O'Grady street property which is also the boundary of the garden, and gives us the good news that although the wall is leaning a bit, there is no risk of it falling down and we don't need to worry.
Sunday we paint the fence - fortunately before the massive storms that came through on Sunday night. Waiting for the weather to settle so we can put a second coat on.
Progressive pictures:

Fencing continues

Fencers returned on Wednesday with a skip, and used their digger to remove all the grass and weeds and some of the topsoil from next door's garden beds. Neighbour worked with them to clear rubbish until they had filled their skip. Garden not yet totally clean but an unbelievably great improvement on the jungle it was a few days ago.

Thursday, the actual fencing restarted, after about a week's break while work was done on the neighbour's side. Here's what the retaining wall half of the fence looks like...

... and note how tidy next door's garden looks.

All over by Christmas?

No, not World War 1, but the final stages of the renos.
Today we put up the last pictures. A number of them have moved from their previous locations, and we are enjoying being surprised to see them somewhere new. The last light fitting went up, so the pictures are also all suitably illuminated.
Peter has been doing some artwork around the edges of our floor tiles where there were some bits of bare concrete, and although the colour match isn't perfect, it looks good.
After further consideration, blinds have been ordered for all the windows, and we hope they will arrive and be fitted before we head off to Tas at the end of October.

We finally selected a fencing contractor who started this week on the replacement of the fence on our south-west side. An issue for this project was the presence of built up vegetable gardens and very large, very old fruit trees close to the fence on our neighbour's property, which were the principal cause of the collapse of the old fence, and a potential danger to any new one. Somewhat to our surprise, rather than being concerned about the impact on the trees/garden, the neighbour is taking advantage of the absence of a fence and the access through our other neighbour's property to do a complete transformation of his garden. On Monday our favourite tree fellers will come and remove all the trees along the fence line, and the fencing contractors will use their little bobcat to take the top layer off the raised beds (including the grass and weeds currently growing there). Neighbour has been out in the garden today doing some clearing up himself - we think it is going to cheer him up to have his yard back under control. We lent him a shovel and made encouraging noises.

Not sure what the birds and possums are going to do when the trees go. We will also miss the shade they provided in the summer, but we can replant some greenery on our side to compensate. And if it gets hot this year before it grows high enough, we'll just pull the new blinds down and/or head off to Tasmania to sail.



And now we can see lots of things that aren't really all that attractive...