Front landscaping hell.

Hi all,
I need help. We have been over about 100 different ideas for the front landscaping of our house and have gotten absolutely nowhere. I don't have a huge budget (about $5000) so hopefully, you lovely people can come up with something. The land levels are doing our heads in. I think the biggest issue is that we have extra rocky dirt left on site from the site cut which I think we need to get rid of. We were hoping to run retaining across the front to the centre line of the house and put a picket fence behind the wall. The problem being is the return back to the stairs. I think it has to be done in block work of some type too.

We
Anyway desperate for ideas.

Hi, at a minimum, yes you will need to remove the excess soil from the verge back to the front line of your property. See Pic.



You will need to build a retaining wall at the step return. To save having to remove tones of soil, I would retain from the step return, around the step landing and down the angle of your drive and across the front to meet up with your neigbor's sandstone block wall. To soften the look I would put a garden bed along the edge of your driveway and across the front to meet up with your neighbor's exisitng garden ben in front of their sandstone block wall. Here is a very quick hand scetch of what I mean.





An alternative to save money on retaining wall costs, you could come out square from the Step return to the front line of your property and make the garden bed along the driveway larger.

Your $5K budget means your job will be DIY. For context, I built 30m of 800mm high drystack block wall on a concrete footing for a touch under $7K.







Hope this helps.

Thank you! That is what we originally kind of came up with. We were hoping to avoid going to council BUT I don't know if it's going to be possible. we don't like all the back turns either so have come up with a bit of a radical plan. No idea if it's possible yet and might stretch the budget. will see!.