ADORABLE DIY Bunny Shelves for Any Kids’ Room ¦ Great Home Ideas

Take your gardening to the next level, literally. Meet Adam's new boss. She's super cute, but tough. Do you like it? Yeah. Yeah! Why put all your eggs in one basket when they look this good? And they're so easy to make. The Aussie bush can be a very harsh environment and it might seem impossible to have a garden as bright and colourful as this one. But with the right plant choices and some clever ideas, it can be absolutely stunning. I'm going to share this moment. Let me know you're out there. Lots of people think that roses are just for the English country garden, but actually, they're really drought-tolerant and hardy once they're established. You'll need to put lots of compost in the soil. That holds on to nutrients. But they like it quite free-draining. And here, it's planted just above this wall, so the water gets away. We're also in a private garden in the New South Wales Blue Mountains, so there's hardly any humidity here. And you can tell at the leaves, they just look lovely and glossy. If you give your plant those three things, it's going to reward you with lots of flowers. This part of the house gets some hot westerly sun and the planting perfectly suits that. We've got these lovely domes of Eliagnus. They're incredibly hardy. They hardly need much water and they prune really, really well. Then you've got the Agapanthus in front of us. Again, a really reliable flower. But one of my favourite flowers is this Salvia lucantha here. Now, this is so easy to care for. Once it's finished flowering, you chop it down and it just does it year after year. You know, there are some really clever plant choices in this garden. But what I've actually come to see is this dramatic landform. So what actually is a landform? Well, it's pretty much what it sounds like. It's just sculpting the land. They've been used in the past for things like burial mounds or ha-ha walls, where you cut away the landscape to keep livestock away from the residential garden, but you maintain a lovely view out. And they're incredibly popular in Europe. They add this fantastic architectural element to a garden. They're like living sculptures. And I'm happy to say I'm starting to see them more in Australia. Landform doesn't have to be about these dramatic features. It's a great option for retaining. You know, we're on a sloping site here and the lovely curves of the greenery just make it so much more inviting. Plus, you don't have the costs of footings, engineering, building and all of that stuff. And you get these lovely little spots to sit and enjoy the garden. What I really like about this garden is the way you get the vertical element in the landform, but then you get the opposite in the dam where the ground falls away to hold the water. And that just makes this feel so much larger and really dynamic. Landforms in the garden, they look breathtaking, but they are so much more than that. They just entice you to walk up them. And as you do, the view of the garden completely changes as your perspective moves around. Remember what you're gaining here, you're not going out, you're going up. So you're gaining elevation. And it's a bit of a walk, but it's definitely worth it because when you get to the top, well, the view is spectacular. Landforms don't have to be enormous things in your garden. Imagine something as subtle as this. It gives you a lovely destination. You can come and sit down, enjoy a picnic. And I'm pretty sure a few kids would enjoy rolling down it too. Yeah, yeah, that was controlled. Now, I know what you're thinking. How on earth do you mow all this grass? Well, first of all, you need the right type of grass. You wouldn't do this with a kaikou that grows really fast. You want something like a cooch or a zoysia that are much slower growing. Then you need to get yourself one of these. This is a hover mower and it's perfect for slopes. No wheels, no tracks. Just lifts up and you can slowly move it along the banks nice and safely. I think I'm going to be here for a while. I'll get back to you. I've got a simple project you can hop onto this weekend. It's a set of bunny ear shelves and I'm using these cute little guys as my inspiration. It's going to make the little ones in your life very hoppy or happy. We've got our inspiration and I'm using some 80mm plywood to make this project. I'm going to get started by doing the circle first, which means I need to find the center of this square. Now we've got our center point, I'm going to use this offcut of ply cut to the size of the circle and nail the center of that to our mark to get the perfect circle. With that marked, I'm going to be using a jigsaw to cut it out. With the circle done, I'm going to use the rest of the ply to cut the shelves out. With the pieces cut out, I'm going to sit these two aside because they'll become the bunny ears later on. But now I'm going to cut a halving joint into these two pieces so I can join the shelf into a cross. Using a jigsaw to cut this rebate out, but to make it easier, I'm using my spade bit. I'll drill a hole first. That way, it's just some square cuts that I need to do up to the hole. And that is looking fantastic. And with them together, I can now sit them on our backing board and I'll glue and screw them in place. Then I'll enclose the perimeter with some 3mm ply. The reason why I'm using 3mm ply is it's nice and flexible. Now, I've had this ripped down at the hardware store out of a 2x4x1200 sheet, and you just want to make sure that they rip it in the direction of the grain. And then when I transported it, I actually put it into the shape of a circle. That way, you can see that it's already starting to curve. To hold it in place, I'll be using glue and some nails. And you just want to start halfway on one of the shelves. I've kept my plywood long that way. Now I can pull it. And when it overlaps where we started, I'm going to mark it, square my line. I can cut it and you'll get the perfect join every time. That looks gorgeous. With the surround put on, now we can get on to the exciting part, and that's cutting out the bunny ears. To mark out the bunny ears, I've just got this off cut of 3mm ply that I'm using. I've got the centre marked at the top and I've got my width marked down the bottom. Once I've joined those two parts, I can use my pencil to mark it out. For the radius at the bottom, so it sits nice and flush, I'm going to sit our shelf on top. Once I've lined up the two pencil marks, I can scribe that and then use a jigsaw to cut it all out. With the ears cut out, I'm going to give everything a quick sand, attach the ears with some glue and screws, and then we're ready for an undercoat. I'll test these ears out before I fit them. Yeah, I think that looks good. And for the colour, we've gone with pink, but the name's the best part, bunny pink. And I've found the perfect spot to fix this shelf to. How cute does it look? But more importantly, let's see what the boss of this room thinks. Hey, what do you think, Hody? Do you like it? Yeah. Yes. What's your favourite colour? Pink. Pink. And what about this? What's this one? A giraffe. Good girl. This one? A rabbit. Yeah, a little rabbit. That one? A ballerina. Ballerina. Do you like doing ballet? Yeah. You like dancing? Yeah. Good girl. Can you give me a high five, Hody? Yes. Who would have thought? The walls have ears. Happy Easter, everyone. Oh, that's a beautiful dance. You may remember this great little courtyard. What an amazing space it is. What you didn't see, though, there was an old rose here that had sentimental value to the homeowner. But don't worry, we didn't dig it up and get rid of it. We actually moved it. I'm about to share with you all my tips on successful transplanting. I thought we'd transplant this because I've heard it's got a bit of a story. Yeah, it was planted when my pop passed away. So it does have some sentimental value behind it. Yeah, it's a lovely looking one as well. I mean, fantastic white flowers on there. So we're going to try and transplant it and move it to the front garden. Sounds great. But the first step is to give it a really big haircut. I mean, it's summer now. We shouldn't really be moving it, but, you know, we've got to break a couple of eggs to make an omelette. So I'm just going to cut this right back almost to twigs. But we want to make sure we keep some of the buds on the plant. So that way, when it goes in, it can shoot from those buds again. We're reducing the amount of leaf because we're reducing the roots. So the combination goes together. If you're giving a rose a hard prune like this, it's a good idea to remove any deadwood whilst you're at it. And you're trying to achieve a nice open vase shape. So any crisscrossing stuff, now's the time for it to go as well. When you're transplanting a rose, it's exactly the same as if you're using a bare rooted stalk. You need your whole pre-dug. Now, mine's limited in size by the surrounding plants. So I'm going to put some soil back in and create almost a cone in the center. Then my root ball is going to sit on top and that's going to force my roots out in a natural habit rather than curling them around. I'll then just look at the canopy and see which way it's going to grow. I think that's quite nice. So it stays away from the path. And then I'll just pop the roots in, backfill and give it a good drink. Giving the roots a really good soak is so important because it gets the soil around them, which promotes new root growth. I've also put some seaweed tonic in here. Now, that has no fertilizer in it. It's got no nitrogen, potassium, none of that sort of stuff. But it is a really good tonic and it will help promote root growth, which is what we need right now. Once the roots get settled in, it won't be long before we start seeing leaves and then flowers again. It's been two weeks and you can see that this rose is really bursting back into life, which is great news. In fact, every stem has got new leaf forming on it, which is also telling me there's plenty going on in the ground. Now, there's a couple of stems here that don't have new growth on them. So I'm just going to whip them off. That's a preventative matter because we don't want dieback to form on this rose because that's just going to let disease into the plant. So snip them off. This has to be one of my favourite things about Easter, watching the excitement on kids' faces as they hunt for their Easter eggs. But you know what? I think they need some homemade baskets. So while they do the hunting, I'm going to do some weaving. You can create your Easter baskets using things from the hardware or the craft store, but you can also find a lot of things in the garden. So, for example, your grasses, vines, branches, even unwanted plants like ivy here. I'm just going to rip that one out. The key is actually to look for things that are pliable. You know, stuff you can bend to form is ideal. I've also got a little bit of plumbago here, a bit of wisteria. You can see just how flexible those are. And over here, there's a bit of jasmine poking through the fence. I think I can weave some magic with that too. I want to know where did you go last night? We're starting by creating quite a basic basket. So it should look like this at the end. And what I've got are some sawn logs, nice and chunky like this that are going to form the base of our basket. Now, with weaving, there's lots of sort of different ways you can do it. But the basic premise is for it to go in and out. So we want our uprights to be sort of odd numbers. So you get that really nice weaving pattern. Now, have you ever noticed that there's always odd numbers in planting, in styling and in weaving? So I'm just going to measure out the circumference of this log. It's about 32 centimetres and we're using nails as uprights. So that means I want to space my nails about 3.5 centimetres apart. Now that I've marked it out, let's pre-drill some holes there before we put the nails in because we don't want those chunky logs to split. You might have seen this stuff in the gardening aisle. So it's actually called twisted paper rope and makes a great plant tie. But it's also really good for weaving. So I'm just going to start by going under and tucking my thumb there just to hold it securely and weaving in and out all the way around. We'll secure that little loose bit later. So as you're weaving, just make sure you push it all down so that it's nice and firm. Of course, the beauty of using these flathead nails is that that rope won't just fall off the top. So now that we're nearing the end here of our basket, see, it's forming nicely. I need to cut off the rope. Just estimate roughly what you need to go around. About there should do it. And I'm going to weave the end in and over the top of the basket so we get that nice sort of twisted rope finish to our basket. Once you get to the finish, just chop that rope a little bit closer and tuck it in. Now, if you don't like the look of those silver nails, just get your hands on a sharpie and colour them in. And just to finish it all off, let's grab some of those grasses that we collected from the garden. Now, wouldn't that make the cutest little Easter table centrepiece? And then once Easter is over, I think it would look gorgeous decked out with succulents. So this next basket is just a little bit more rustic, so it's only using garden grown ingredients. So what I've got here, and I know it looks a little bit messy, promise you'll see it come together, are some wisteria vines that I've just looped around and tied together at the bottom. So you can see I'll have nine different stems that we can weave around. So I'm just going to chop these stems off here to make it all a bit neater and then secure our base. I'm just doing a little bit of a crisscross pattern. Then you can get into the full on weaving. And for me, the base is always the trickiest part to get right. But once it's done, the whole process becomes a lot easier. You can see I've used quite a mix of materials in there. So I've got a little bit of ivy, a little bit of plumbago and now a little bit of wisteria. There you go. Now you can see it's actually formed a basket. So the only thing left to do is really secure this top. And I'm just going to use a little bit of jasmine. All the baskets look amazing, but I've decided this one's much more my size. All right, guys, do you want to put your eggs in the basket and then we can eat them? What do you reckon? Let's fill these pretty little baskets with eggs. Thank you, darling. Well, you know what they say? Easter is the one time of year where you can put all your eggs in one basket. When is a room not a room? Well, when it's an outdoor terrace and they have become the quintessential Aussie extension. They can be as simple as an overhead pergola or something like this, which is almost an integrated room complete with its kitchen and barbecue. But there are a few key things in getting them right. And the first is making sure they have access to to northern light or ideally morning or preferably afternoon sun. And by finishing them in the same color as the rooms they run off, that will help visually tie them together. The other thing you've got to consider is how the terrace connects back to the building. And one detail you really have to get right is the threshold. Here we have a flat transition between inside and out. That means we have to set our door tracking system down between ideally a hard surface. It's a tricky detail to get right, but it really achieves that seamless indoor outdoor feel. An easier way of doing it is just have a small step. And that's probably what you do, particularly if you're attaching a terrace to an existing building. Bifolds will generally give you a bigger opening but are more expensive than sliders because there's a little more engineering involved because they're top hung in tracks overhead. It could require steel to carry the load. Sliding doors or sliders is the other option. It means that there's a top and bottom track. And if you detail it correctly, you can slide them back into a hidden cavity on the outside wall. That achieves a complete opening without the complexity of bifolds. That's pretty neat. Oh, the other great thing about an outdoor terrace is because they're not fully enclosed, it means they're not part of your floor space ratio. Councils don't include them as part of your floor plan, yet they're relatively economical to construct compared with other parts of your home. But if you detail them and connect them properly, I guarantee you they'll become one of the most loved parts of the home. Come round now, walk on, walk on. You might remember I was at Cooma Cottage near Yes. And I met up with a bloke by the name of Chris. And we talked about Clydesdales. And boy, do I love Clydesdales. Wow. That is a horse. He's a big boy. But one in particular was a horse called Hunter. I said, where did he come from? He said, heavy horse heaven. I said, where's that? He said, just down the road. And here I am at heavy horse heaven. She's the lady who runs this place. Her job has been to rescue, rehabilitate and rehome so many horses. Her stories will amaze you. Hello, Dr. Harry, how are you? This is Diesel. Diesel is a nine year old pure shire gelding. So he's got an amazing story, this horse. He has. Tell me roughly what happened. Well, a couple of years ago, we got a phone call from a young lady. Unfortunately, she wasn't being able to be home very often to look after him, and he had developed stringhole. Both back legs were really bad. I was heartbroken when I first saw him, Dr. Harry. So what is stringhole? It's a disease of the nervous system. The Australian form is noted due to toxicity from certain flat weeds. Wasn't much else to eat. So he ate the weeds. You've got to eat something, haven't you? Come on, big man. Hits the abdomen almost when he walks. The leg that gives it all away is the right hind leg. So I guess my audience is also concerned, is this painful to the horse? No, it's something over which the horse doesn't have any control. Correct. So usual treatment, plenty of magnesium, plenty of B-complex. Vitamin B, C-S, that's the one. Lots of time. Karen, what got you interested in this? Because you're a bit of a one-off doing this horse rescue thing with such big horses. Oh, well, I've been a horse lover all my life, and I'm a big believer in offering a home to rescue animals. So here we are, 10 years, and we've put through over 120 horses and, yeah. 120 horses? Yeah. And you got some helpers here? You don't do it all on your own? No, I couldn't do it on my own. I'm really, really lucky to have such a good group of volunteers that come in every Sunday and give me a hand. They just love horses? Yeah. It's contagious, isn't it? Yeah. What marvellous work you've done with this horse. Thank you. Yeah, he's a good boy. And what a great horse you are, aren't you? And I think you know it. He does. Yes, folks, I think he knows it. So, Dr. Harry, this is Buster. Hello, Buster. How are you, son? You all right? Good boy. What's his story? His owner has loved him since he was very young, but he had to move to a property that wasn't really built for horses. It was very, very rocky. Buster has another disease of nervous origin. It's called shivers. But every now and again, you'll see him widen his back legs when he stops. Wow. It's a very poor example of the splits. Shivers is a largely inherited disease, particularly those that are tall and of the draught type. There is no recognised treatment. OK, stop him there. There it goes. It doesn't seem to bother him a great deal, Dr. Harry. But it can be progressive in some circumstances. You don't want to get any any worse. No. OK, so this is the new arrival. Yes, this is Macy. Macy. She came in this morning, Dr. Harry. Her family went through a tough time. There were other horses on the property and some of them were missing out on some nutrition. The owner wasn't in a financial way to help her out. So she's asked if we would take her on. So what breed is she supposed to be? She's supposed to be a Percheron Cross. Wow. See, folks at home, the Percheron is basically a French draught horse. Fairly solid sort of horse. Let's go have a look. Let's go say g'day. Come meet Macy. Oh, she sees speed. She knows what that means. Hello, big girl. Oh, my goodness. We've got some work to do, Dr. Harry. Oh, my goodness. Yeah, you'd want to introduce food slowly. Very slowly. I reckon it's a while since that tummy's seen a mouthful or two. So long term, what are your plans for her? Well, long term, we'll rehabilitate her back to as good health as we can get her. But we'd like to keep them on for a little while and and get to know who they are and what the proper good home for them will be. But she's a sweet girl. You know, Karen, if I was a horse and I was able to look at that 24 hours a day, seven days a week, I'd think I was in heaven. I really would. You're doing a fantastic job here. An amazing job. Keep going. Thank you, Dr. Harry. Keep going.