The Vaucluse Courtyard is small enough that visitors are often surprised to learn it took sixteen weeks to build. The constraint of the site explained most of that.
On On Site
Week one was demolition: removing a poorly drained concrete slab, three layers of paving below it, and a buried clothesline footing nobody had remembered. Weeks two and three were structural — a new sub-grade, a new drainage line tied into the kitchen downpipes, and the steel rill formed in place. We could only access the site through a one-metre side gate, so every load of bluestone came in by wheelbarrow over the course of two long days.
“Sixteen weeks, three metres wide, one lilly pilly craned in over the roof. A diary of how a leftover side return became the most-used room of a Vaucluse home.”
The lilly pilly was the moment. We craned a 1.6-metre root-ball multi-trunk specimen over the roof of the house from a truck parked in the street, then hand-walked it through a temporary opening cut into the boundary fence. The fence was rebuilt the same afternoon.
Finish-out was slow and quiet — hand-pointed mortar between the pavers, two coats of lime wash on the boundary walls, and a settling-in period of four weeks before we brought the clients in. The garden is now a year and a half old. The moss is doing exactly what we hoped.
