Swimming pool

Mr Sasanqua wanted a swimming pool in the back garden ever since we started talking about rebuilding the house. Our landscape designer recommended a few pool companies to give us a quote on the pool and we had a meeting with one of them. Pools are expensive. We are considering the option at this stage (until we can afford it in a couple of years' time) of only having a hole for the pool dug by a big digger when the old house is demolished and while site access is easy. This is because accessing the back garden after the new house is built will be hard. If they need to use a very small excavation equipment that can go through a 90cm gap on the side of the house, and wheelbarrow the dirt and sandstone out, the additional cost would be ridiculous (roughly $20,000 just for hard access). We can fence off the dug hole, and finish the pool when we can afford it.

We would like to have for our pool: glass fence, feature rock wall at the far side, water feature down the rock wall, underwater lights, solar/gas heated water, integration into back garden landscaping. We will see how many out of this list we can afford.

We need to submit DA for the pool soon now that the house DA has gone in to council, because once DA approval for house comes through the demolition and building starts fairly quickly and we don't want to miss the window of site access for digging the pool.

Landscape design

While our builder is preparing documents for council submission, hydraulics engineer's report was organised by them, and we received the good news that we will not need a stormwater retention system burried in the back garden. However we will need to move the rainwater tank up to the side of the garage which makes the side access on the right hand side quite a bit narrower.

We decided to use our own landscape designer to do our landscaping for council submission. There was originally $1000 or so allocated for a landscape design in our builder's tender, but it would only get us a basic "lawn and shrubs" type of landscaping drawn up just to get the DA in. So prior to signing the contract, we asked to have the allocated landscaping cost taken out from the tender. By spending just a little more and going to a landscape designer we chose, we were able to have a really nice manicured front garden and low-maintenance but attractive side and back gardens designed. This designer happened to have worked with our builder before, so they will send the finished landscape design to the builder who will then submit it to council along with the house plan.

Our landscape design for front, side and back gardens are brilliant with great plants selection, and very nice features in the front garden to really dress up the house. We are advised of the rough cost for building and planting out the landscaping based on this design, so we will set aside a budget for it.

Side Garden

Front Garden