A mammoth undertaking

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 today filling in the gap between the wooden sleepers and the underlying concrete blocks. And that’s just for the lower terrace.

Here’s a “record shot” showing progress to date, taken from the same vantage point as before:

Progress after three weeks

The builders have given themselves the rest of the week off, as they have a family wedding coming up. That’s fine by me – I’m paying them for the job, not by the hour, and anyway I could do with a couple of builder-free days myself. They have pretty much finished the lower terrace now, bar the fencing which will run along the top.  It’s looking pretty impressive, and it’s getting much easier to visualise what the completed project will look like.

Lower terrace behind the house

The picture above shows the lower terrace at the back and side of the house. Directly in front in the picture is a slope going up to the second terrace. To help orientate you, the previous photo was taken from the upper-left-hand corner of this picture. The most tricky bit of the build so far has been the corner to the middle-left of the photo, where the sleepers have all needed to be cut at an angle to make them fit.

Outside the kitchen door

Another tricky bit was directly outside the kitchen door, where the sleepers needed to be fitted around the oil-pipe leading to my boiler. They’ve done a very neat job there I think.