Well I can barely believe it's Friday already. A belated happy Easter to everybody. This week Dr J. has been on holiday and that at the moment means DIY.
"Fancy doing the garden?" He said. "I've a week off."
Well two giant skips later and we now have a much lower garden. But my, do my knees and back know about it! Our aim is to take what appeared to be a car park and make it into a lawn at the same level as the pavement.
We have a rather odd set up with the house. It is the end terrace at the end of the road so we have a corner plot, but instead of having the door on the front in line with the rest of the terrace it is round the side on the other road, and then we don't a back garden as such but a side garden and our back door did look like another front door to a different house. We often got people trying to post junk mail through both, the back door doesn't have a letter box though so that threw them.
 |
| when we bought the house |
 |
| the old back door seen from the street |
After we moved in last year one of the first aims with the garden was to get some sort of fence up and make it a little more private that we managed last summer, but then the inside of the house took precedent again, so that's how it stayed till now. One problem is that it was so high, even with high fence when standing in the garden you could be seen so we wanted to lower it for some more privacy. Well at the beginning of this week that seemed like quite a reasonable task. We ordered a skip and went out to see what was under that thin layer of soil and odd tuft of grass.
First thing we found was tarmac, over most of it, right up to within 6 inches of the sort of flower beds around the path. Ok Dr J. got a pick axe from the garage and began to break it up whilst I dug around the edges and explored deeper down. Under the tarmac was a complete layer of bricks that had been laid on their sides to make an earlier drive, lots were too fragile to get out intact just crumbling up, but we dug out enough for walled flower beds, possible raised veg patch and a pizza oven (quite excited at the thought of that).
There was a lot of rubble under that, broke bricks, bits of concrete, old tiles and even part of an old tiled fireplace (would have been lovely if that had come up intact). Then after starting to get that lot out, much to our despair we found more tarmac and under that more brick, it was quite amazing in not a good way. Well we have it at a reasonable depth now, it will slope up to the garage but that is inevitable, and there is still the other side of the path to do, but looking at that it seems that it is just large slabs and earth (which can be spread over the opposite side to start the topsoil off).
So we have reached Friday and we thought we might have a little bit of time off, the forecast was for rain, and although it hasn't started yet I still hold out hope, the weather has been very good for us so far this week, no excuses there. Anyway there's a couple of DIY tasks for the inside of the house and a small chance of some computer time so I nipped on here quickly and now I need to update the website a little (a few items that I haven't got on there yet).
Don't forget the Giveaway ends midnight BST 30th April 2014, all you need to do to enter is to like my facebook page, share the Facebook post about the give away (it's pinned to the top of the page) and post a comment letting me know you have done it. Good luck everyone. Oh and don't forget to have a look at the Facebook shop while you're at it.
Well back to normal next week, Dr J. will be back at work and so garden work will slow down quite a bit, but I do still hope to have a lawn by summer and at least we are well on our way now. More from me next week,
 |
| you can see the old level by the paint on the wall I did last year. |
Hugs and Kisses
Ally
No comments:
Post a Comment