Although I’m very pleased with the work the builders have done, it was such a good feeling when they had finished. I was looking forward to having the house (and garden) to myself without tripping over builders. But my life at the moment really does seem to be a case of two steps forward and […]
The builders had pretty much finished by the time I got home yesterday afternoon. They came back this morning to return the garage key and re-seed a few patches of the lawn that had got the worse for wear. I’m surprised that the lawn isn’t in worse shape actually, when you consider how many tens […]
Does anyone else remember the Carla Lane sitcom, Butterflies, starring Wendy Craig and a very young Nicholas Lyndhurst? It must have been on around 1980 +/- a few years. There was one set-piece in it which always made me laugh. It was a four-car family (father, mother, both teenage sons each had a car – […]
Ever since Chris was first diagnosed with terminal cancer, and I had an “acute stress reaction” to the situation (for which read “pretty comprehensive breakdown”), I’ve been working part time. Initially, this was an informal arrangement, and I took a mixture of leave and sick-leave to cover the times I was unable to work. However, […]
I got home from work this afternoon to find four very tired builders – 103 sleepers had been delivered just after I left this morning, and they’d been working through those, as well as finishing off the first level of fencing. All the preparatory work they did yesterday has really paid off, and they’ve made […]
Sorry, no photos of the garden tonight – it was raining when I got home from work and I was in no mood to stand around getting wet. Besides, there wasn’t a great deal new to see. I’m impatient to get a better view of what the terraces will look like, and am really keen […]
Next door’s cat has been spending a lot of time over the past few afternoons and evenings sitting on the path between the lower and upper terraces, looking at the steel I-beams, membrane and sleepers with what looks like a puzzled expression on its face. I think it’s bothered about where all the mice have […]
A colleague asked me today how I was getting on with building the Ledbury Bypass! I can see what he means – the amount of material the garden is swallowing is absolutely massive. Ten tons of pea gravel were delivered this morning while I was having my breakfast, and it’s all been used up already […]
The 300 new oak sleepers that I need for the garden have been cut to order by a saw-mill in the South of France. They were meant to arrive last week, but have been delayed. They have apparently been stuck on a lorry on the other side of the Channel, due to high winds disrupting […]
The builders have been hard at work on the garden. All of the steel I-beams (all 29 of them!) have been positioned and concreted in place. Since each beam weighs about 1/3 of a ton, and it all had to be done by hand as there is no space for heavy machinery, this was a […]
