Your project workbook — what you will have produced by the end

This course is not a reading list. Thirty of its lessons end by asking you to produce a document about your own block — a measured plan, a soil report, a quantity take-off, a defect list. Those thirty documents are the point. Stacked in order they are a landscape design and construction package for your property, the same package a designer would charge you for, except that you understand every page because you wrote it.

This lesson is the ten minutes you spend deciding where that package lives before you start filling it.

What a professional does at this stage

A landscaper opens a job file before they open a ute door. Everything measured, photographed, quoted, changed or paid gets written into it, on the day, with a date. Not because they enjoy admin — because four things go wrong without it.

Quoting. You cannot price what you have not measured. A designer who loses their site notes does not re-guess the numbers, they drive back out — an hour of someone’s day, or on your own project, a Saturday.

Disputes. In WA a home building work contract must be in writing and signed by both parties, and the deposit before work starts is capped at 6.5 per cent — see Building and Energy. A complaint about that contract has to be lodged within three years. Every one of those protections is worth exactly as much as your ability to produce the document. A verbal variation agreed on site is not a variation, it is two people’s memories, and they will differ by about $3,000 by the time the job ends.

Handover between trades. The retic contractor needs the drainage layout; the paver needs to know where the sleeves went. On a professional job that information is on paper. On yours it has to come from you.

Future you. Everything under the ground goes invisible the moment it is backfilled, and stays invisible for the twenty years you own the house.

There is a fifth benefit specific to a homeowner. If you put the work out to three Perth landscapers, handing all three the same plan and the same written specification is the only way the three prices mean anything. Three quotes against three different assumptions is not a comparison.

What each phase deposits

Phase	What it deposits	What the next phase does with it
1 Trade and process	Project charter	Sets the rules you will hold yourself to
2 Brief	Design brief	The document the whole design is later judged against
3 Site analysis	Base plan, levels survey, soil report, sun and wind analysis, services plan, existing garden audit, constraints and opportunities plan	Everything the design must obey
4 Approvals	Your water rules	What you are allowed to build and water
5 Concept design	Zoning diagram, material palette, hydrozone plan, concept plan	The agreed shape of the garden
6 Documentation	Grading plan, drainage plan, planting plan and schedule, specification and schedule of works	What gets built, and by whom, in what order
7 Costing	Quantity take-off, cost plan, staging plan	What it costs and what happens first
8 Build	Available water measurement, irrigation as-built	Proof of what is actually in the ground
9 Handover	Defect list, as-built drawings, maintenance manual	The record you own the garden from
10 Maintenance	Seasonal calendar, retic audit record	Keeping it alive through a Perth year
11 Review	Project review, project portfolio	Honest assessment against the brief

Thirty documents. You have already produced one if you did the project charter.

Where to keep it

If you have an account on this site, each deliverable saves as you write it and assembles at /my/workbook/ in course order, with a counter, a print button and a download-as-Markdown button so you can take the whole set elsewhere. Nothing is hidden behind the account — every lesson is readable signed out.

A hardcover notebook works just as well. This is not a trick answer — the trade ran on carbon-copy site books for fifty years. What a notebook does not do is back itself up, so photograph its pages occasionally.

Either way you need somewhere for the things that are not text: photos, receipts, quotes, PDFs of plans, the emailed asset-owner drawings. One folder, one hierarchy, backed up somewhere that is not the phone in your pocket. Name files so they sort themselves — 2026-08-02-back-corner-northwest.jpg, not IMG_4471.jpg. Keep every receipt, including the $40 ones. If you ever sell, rent out or insure the improvement, what the work cost is a question someone asks, and receipts are the only answer that counts; ask your accountant how long to hold them.

Taking “before” photos you can actually repeat

Most people take fifty before photos and none of them are comparable to anything, because every shot is from a different spot at a different height on a different lens. The discipline that fixes it is called photopoint monitoring, and the DWER guide is the free WA reference. Its core warning: small changes in position, height, angle or direction have a large effect on your ability to see change.

Set up six to ten fixed positions and shoot the same set every time.

1. Choose the positions. Each corner of the back garden looking in, standing at the back door or alfresco, the view from the window you look out of most, down the side access, and from the verge looking at the house. Add one close position per problem area.
2. Fix the spot and the aim. Stand on something that will not move — a specific paver corner, the edge of the slab, a peg. Aim the centre of the frame at a fixed object still there in two years: a fence post, the downpipe, the meter box. Note the compass bearing off your phone as backup.
3. Fix the height. Eye level, roughly 1.5 metres, and hold it. Crouching for one shot and standing for the next ruins the pair.
4. Fix the lens. Modern phones have three. Pick the main one, use it every time, and never let it slip to 0.5x ultrawide — the guide is explicit that wide-angle and telephoto alter perspective and make a shot impossible to repeat. Landscape orientation, highest resolution, two shots each.
5. Pick your light. Bright overcast, early morning or late afternoon. A Perth midday summer sky gives you blown highlights and black shadow, and nothing in either.
6. Write the set down. Position number, what it aims at, bearing, height. That sheet is what lets you repeat the set in eight months.

Then repeat: before anything happens, after demolition, after earthworks, before each backfill, at completion, and each season afterwards.

The photos that pay for themselves

• Every open trench, with a tape measure in shot, before it is backfilled. Retic mainline, laterals, sleeves under paving, conduit, drainage runs. This is the highest-value photo set on the whole job, and it feeds as-built drawings.
• The existing retic controller program, before you change a setting. It tells you how the garden has been watered for years.
• Cracks that already exist — in the neighbour’s fence, the driveway, the render, the paving — before machinery arrives. Dated photographs are what end the argument about who cracked what.
• Deliveries, so quantities can be checked against invoices.

Photograph trenches from the edge, standing back from the spoil. Do not climb into an unsupported excavation to get a better angle; trench collapse is a routine way to be killed on a small site, and no photo is worth it.

What the finished set is worth

Comparable quotes. Variations you can price instead of argue about. A council enquiry answered in one email. A maintenance manual that tells you what the plant in the west bed actually is. An as-built plan that means the next trench you dig misses your own irrigation mainline. And an honest review against the brief, which is only possible because you wrote the brief down.

That is the end of Phase 1. The next phase starts the way every professional job starts: with the enquiry call, and the questions a good landscaper asks before they will even quote a site visit.