BrideShedRevisited

It's Sunday, it's been a day of cakes and visitors, it's very late, and I'm going to write this tomorrow!

But, in the meantime, here's a picture of a squirrel and a decorated dustbin lid...

One of my better shots with Vincent's camera!  When I've finished with it, it might even be a Christmas card...

More tomorrow!!

On Monday everything goes swimmingly.  The salvage yard people are delivering the Burberry reclaimed flooring between 3.30 and 4pm.  Mum is organised to sit in the house and wait, and Rob is also coming to finish the retaining wall at about the same time.  Organised or what?  At lunchtime I phone the salvage yard to check they’re really going to deliver and am told ‘yes, that’s right – my son remembered the house with the pool, so he’s already delivered it’.  Er, where, exactly?  ‘He put it outside, that’s ok isn’t it?’ Well, it’ll kind of have to be ok…  I let mum know and say that I don’t expect her to move it all, and that we have no idea how much wood 28 square yards is.  It’s a helluva lot, that’s how much it is. 

About a sitting room full, to be exact.  Anyway, mum texts me later to say she and a passing dogwalker (see, there are benefits to living on a footpath) have shifted the lot into the sitting room.  Where it has completely filled one corner.  Which is fine, as the corner isn’t used for much.  Except my Christmas tree.  In about 6 weeks time.  It’s only Monday and we’ve already reached the ‘oh bugger’ moment…

Rob is hard at work with the retaining wall by the time I get home, and grumbling about the fact that my lovely bricks are all different sizes.  I manage not to say it’ll add charm, and make sympathetic noises instead.  He’s hardly started, yet says he’s planning ‘just one more course’.  Not so much a retaining wall as something to trip over then, eh?  I can see ‘finish retaining wall’ being added to Sarah and Vincent’s list…

I leave him to it, Guy and Blunkett arrive and we do cake stuff… Some time later Rob knocks on the window and we go out to see what he’s done – we have a lovely wall!  It’s already higher than he said he’d do, and he asks how much more we want on it – we agree another two courses for the highest bit of the bank, and he promises to come back on Tuesday to finish it.  He’s warming to our lighting too – he says it’s faintly surreal knocking up a brick wall surrounded by trees and party lights – like Peter Pan is going to drop out of the trees and help him.  Vivid imagination, our Rob…

On Tuesday there’s no sign of him, but he does come back on Wednesday and, sure enough, he finishes the wall!  This is Serious Progress…

On Saturday we finally crack this building lark.  You see, what you do is invite two very good friends to stay for the weekend, and then make them do all the work… Guy and I are agreed that this is Much Simpler Than DIY (doing it yourselves) and so we’re converts…  The plan is to build a path and sitting out area for in front of the cabin, which will involve a retaining wall because of the slope.  And the brick line needs to carry on in front of the wall so that I can mow the grass…  Guy and I haven’t got a clue how to do it, but Sarah and Vincent turn up early, have a quick coffee and crack on…  The weather is glorious (well, ok, it’s not frosty and it’s not raining, that’ll do).  Guy is not particularly well but is being brave, so we give him easy jobs to do like buying 6 sacks of mortar and shovelling gravel.  See, I can do sympathetic.

I mark up the line for the bricks, we clean off more bricks, and stick them in.  Then we lift them all back out again, mix up mortar, and put them back in.  Seems like we’ve done this before! 

Then to the wall – Sarah and I lug stones from where Guy and I had dumped them, and Vincent builds a wall… we fill the void with soil and before long it really looks like a wall. 

I mix up more mortar and Vincent points the stones.  Remember how Darren the Digger put all the soil from the path in the wood and then drove over it to compact it and make it flat? 

Well, we dig some of that up as backfill too… 

Before long it’s time to put the membrane down – Sarah has her own technique for keeping the thing in place while we throw gravel at it!

We wheelbarrow more and more gravel, mum arrives with another barrow and is pressed into action filling the fiddly hole between the bricks and the grass, and Blunkett finds whoever is nearest to ground level and demands a tummy tickle…

Guy, Vincent and I are shovelling gravel (Sarah is Chief Raker and Director of Barrows) when Guy and I realise we’ve forgotten something… we were meant to put slabs in the gravel.  Oops.  Do we admit it to Vincent?  Or keep schtum and do them ourselves later?  We fess up…  Vincent says it’s not a problem (damned fine actor) and we move some slabs down to the cabin.  And then stand and look at that giant slab from the path… do we put it in place or leave it where it is and hope it buries itself again?  We agree to move it… 10 feet across the ‘grass’ and then up and over the retaining wall without touching the wall…   We walk it into place and then Guy, Vincent and I lift it over the wall – and we do it!  I’m still not sure how, given that Guy and I couldn’t move it at all last week (Vincent must eat spinach) but it’s in place, and looks great.  WOO HOO!

Eventually we stand back to admire our handiwork and it’s well worth admiring – it’s FAB!  All entirely due to Sarah and Vincent’s efforts.  As we stand admiring we realise that it would be better if the wall went about six feet further round the path, just because of where the levels are, and we agree we’ve had enough and we’ll tweak that end on Sunday.  We are all stiff and aching – Vincent and Sarah have hot baths, and Guy and I have a swim… We took a picture of the finished wall but it was so dark you can’t see anything, so here’s a picture of it mostly finished before we added the gravel…

On Sunday it POURS.  It’s cold, and hammering with rain… Plan B is to Go And Do Other Things and then build the end bit of the wall after lunch, so we visit the farmers market, go for a coffee and visit a fabric shop.  Somewhere between ‘coffee’ and 'fabric’ we abandon all hope of building and agree the weather has defeated us – it’s utterly disgusting, cold and filthy wet.  We go home and put the heating on instead…

Achieved:  We have a wall and somewhere to sit out in front of the cabin.  If it ever stops raining.
Hours worked: If we count all four of us, that’s probably about 24 man hours on Saturday alone…
Meditation progress:  Zippo.  Either building, eating or sleeping!
Purchases:   6 sacks of mortar.
Wildlife update:  I’ve got pictures of squirrels!  No, really, I have… it’s just that I’ve irritated my scanner by changing my mind halfway through a scan and now it’s sulking.  When I get it working I’ll put pics of squirrels on here.  Honest.
Plan: We can’t do much without daylight, so it’s cake decorating every night this week until Saturday – then we’ll be tweaking the end bit of the wall. 
The ‘oh bugger’ moment of the week:  Well, two really.  Firstly on Monday when the wood got delivered early and then, secondly, after about 12 hours of torrential rain on Sunday when the new gravel was still resolutely pink.  When it was delivered we all agreed it was the dust on it that made it pink instead of grey.  Well, it’s now not dusty, and it’s still pink.  Doesn’t really matter for the path and cabin, but the bits of gravel left on the gravel outside the pool house are pink and the original stuff is grey.  So now we have piebald gravel.  Oh bugger.
Sarah’s tip of the week:  When mixing mortar, don’t ever say ‘I like this job’ because everybody will then be very happy to let you do it… The novelty wears off somewhere around the 5th load…
Fascinating fact:  Sarah and I are old enough to have known each other for 44 years...  You can see from this photo that we've always had fun when we're together...

And, by the way, who the hell dressed me in that shirt??

HUGE Thanks of the week:  To Sarah and Vincent, brilliant friends, and without whom there would be no wall… We’ve all agreed to spend New Year together having fun and relaxing.  Although Guy and I are fairly sure there may be plastering to do by then…

After the midweek excitement (yep, there was a midweek entry this week) I decide to take things easy on Thursday.  So I take the lights down, swim, clean the car, feed the birds, redecorate the squirrel feeder and photograph the cakes.  Then I have breakfast and go to work…  Rob is coming back on Sunday to take down the shuttering and make a start on the retaining wall.

Friday is a completely unsheddy day – we have a fantastic night out with Gareth and Nic where we have a tournament of Wii games at their newly extended house.  Actually, it’s not a completely unsheddy day as we admire the colour of their sitting room and think it would be an excellent colour for a shed…

On Saturday morning, after our late night, we sit in bed with a cup of tea and ponder our day… we could sweep leaves, we could do more to the path edge, we could do cakes… we’re just at the ‘stretching out of the toes and taking it easy’ stage when a car turns up.  It’s Rob.  SHIT!  We rush around like an old fashioned film, and we’re out of bed, dressed and outside within 2 minutes, trying to look like we’ve been up for hours… Which probably would have worked if I hadn’t had my trouser leg stuck in my right sock.  Hey ho.  We make Rob a cup of tea and he starts on taking the shuttering down.  Weirdly, he doesn’t want all that lovely wood, and he’s leaving it for us for firewood – no wonder builders costs so much if they use new wood every time.

While he’s doing his stuff, I clean more bricks, and Guy walks up to his house and back again to get the half moon edging tool which I thought was at my house but wasn’t.  We’re always finding what we need is ‘at the other house’.  Hopefully that won’t happen by this time next year….

In the afternoon Guy measures the width of the path – it’s the width of a roll of membrane ‘plus a brick’ and makes an edge – and I follow taking the earth out to the required depth and placing bricks on the line.

Then we take all the bricks out again.

Mix up some concrete….

And put the bricks back in!

We’re done – one concreted line of bricks, sorted.

In the evening Guy has a gig and I marzipan and ice a cake for Children in Need, make ivy and holly leaves and throw the engagement cake in the oven.  The ivy and holly leaves will go on the Children in Need cake but really it’s an experiment for Charlotte’s wedding cake, due for the end of November which is due to have ivy garlands on it, and we want to practice…

On Sunday morning it rains, meaning our clay soil is STICKY.  Impossible to work with, so we abandon paths and shove ivy leaves on the experimental charity cake instead.  Looks ok, if a little lumpy… the wedding cake will be better!

By late morning it’s brightened up, so we can start… The bricks are beautifully stuck to their cement (hooray) so all we have to do is fill back to the bricks, turf the gap from the bits we previously cut off, dig out all the lumpy bits or bits that are too high (lots), put down membrane and fill it with gravel.  That’s all there is to it…    The gravel is outside the pool cabin, up a flight of steps.  Or down, if you’re coming the other way… 

We rig up a ‘bridge’ across the path so that we can wheelbarrow gravel down the flowerbed instead of carrying it down the steps… much easier, if a little scary if you overload the barrow!

It’s been a while since we’ve done anything this physical and by the time we stop (after finishing the path and clearing the garden of leaves) we are KNACKERED.  And very, very stiff…  Thank goodness for hot baths and GIN!

Achieved:  Path three quarters of the way to the cabin – we’ve stopped because that’s where we need to start shaping it round to the front of the cabin and building a wall to raise the level.  Sarah and Vincent are visiting next weekend, so it’s a nice little project we’re saving for them…
Hours worked: Not sure.  Can we have ‘muscles overworked’ instead?
Meditation progress:  Er, like, when?  Must try harder to find 10 minutes to do nothing.
Purchases:   Does more gin count?
Pressies: Mum brought us a beautiful wooden duck.  He’s called Shed Duck.  He probably needs a better name…
Wildlife update:  The new badger is coming along nicely – he visits at about 8.30 most evenings, eats his fruit cake and peanuts and doesn’t dig up the lawn.  I’ve now finished the film of the squirrels, but can’t remember how to get the film out of the camera… Memo to self:  must email Vincent and ask…
Plan: Rob is coming back on Monday to build the retaining walls for the slope behind the base.  He’s using my lovely bricks and he thinks they are wonderful.  No he doesn’t, actually – he’s appalled that anyone would use old bricks when you can buy nice straight new ones that you don’t have to knock the mortar off.
The ‘oh bugger’ moment:  Remember I efficiently took the lights back down on Thursday morning?  Rob has said he needs them again for Monday, so they’ve had to go back up.  Oh bugger.
Sarah’s tip of the week:  If you’re wearing steel toecapped workboots on clay soil, do NOT then walk on gravel…  Not unless you want each boot to weigh three stone, anyway.

What is it about builders and bases?  On the pool build we had to adjust the shuttering to get it straight and the idiot builder ‘forgot’ to put in a damp proof course, and now this one hasn’t turned up… I ring Rob, somewhat miffed, on Monday morning to find out when he’s going to be doing the shuttering… later on today, he promises, and sure enough he makes a start.  It’s dark when I get home but by torchlight it looks ok.  On Tuesday he rings in the morning to say that rather than make it too big for the base to fit, he’s made it smaller – by THREE INCHES in each direction.  Suddenly our 14’ x 18’ shed is a 13’9” x 17’9” shed.  He asks ‘is that OK?’  Well, actually, mate, since you asked, no it bloody isn’t.  When we said 14 x 18 we actually meant 14 x 18.  Good grief.  I say I think it will be too small for the shed, and I ring Keith the Shed to find out.  Lovely Keith says it’s ok, he can make the shed to fit the base, and he’ll just make it smaller.  But we don’t want a smaller shed!  Rob fixes the size, and rings me proudly later to say he’s done it (why so proud – he’s only done what we asked him to do in the first place), and we’re all set for the concreting on Wednesday but the mixer can’t deliver till 4, and have I got any torches…  It’s dark by 5 here now, so only an hour is pushing it.  I say I’ll put out the party lights.

On Tuesday I get my hair cut incredibly quickly – too short again.  I must learn NOT to go to the hairdressers when I’m stressed as I then say ‘chop it all off’ and am unhappy when they do.  Still, it’ll be quicker to dry in the mornings…  Anyway, I get home and clamber into the attic for the party lights, then set about stringing them up in the dark.  Easiest to plug them in first then add the bulbs, lighting the way as I go… I feel sure that one can’t get electrocuted from a light bulb but then I don’t really understand electricity.  Anyway, I don’t get fried, and the lights go up.  It looks really pretty!  Partyish, really… 

Guy arrives and makes suitably admiring noises about the lights and we stand and imagine our shed.  And notice the bulge in the shuttering…  the front edge is bowing out by about an inch.  The back edge is bowing in by nearly as much, and the left side has a weird swerve in the shuttering two foot from the end.  We get the tape measure and find that the sides are, indeed, bulging.  We measure too – 14’ across the front (whoopee) and 17’11” to the back. Close enough.  Just for good measure we check the diagonals to make sure it’s square.  It isn’t.  Not by MILES.  Well, by 4 inches anyway – seems like miles to us.  If we’d wanted a parallelogram, we’d have done it ourselves – we’re good at those.  Rob’s going to have to fix it before the concreting.  We ring his mobile but there’s no answer…

On Wednesday morning I decide maybe we are being hasty, and perhaps four inches out isn’t that bad… I email my lovely Auntie Annie who’s an architect and Knows About These Things.  I ask if four inches is a long way out.  It seems it is.  Bummer.  I phone Rob and say that we ‘believe the shuttering may not be entirely square’.  See, I can do tactful.  He says the sides are the right lengths and equal.  I say that I know the sides are the right lengths and equal, but it’s not square because the diagonals don’t match.  He says the sides are the right length and equal.  I ask him to meet me at home at 2 to sort it out and to cancel the concrete if he doesn’t think it can be done.  He says it’s too late to cancel the concrete, and that he’ll have a think and phone me back.  I spend the morning wondering whether we’re doing it, and whether I need my afternoon off or not.  He rings back to say it’s ok, he’s worked it out and that the diagonal needs to measure 22.8m.  TWENTY TWO POINT EIGHT METRES?  That’s half way to Guy’s house!  The length is only 18’…  Oh hell.  He says he’ll sort it.  I whiz off from work at 12.30 and hurtle to the salvage yard to pick up the remaining slabs and talk reclaimed floors with Mr T… it seems his recycled Canadian maple Burberry floor is selling incredibly fast, so I end up buying what we need.  Eek!  We have a floor for a shed that doesn’t even have a slab…

Mr T is incredibly chatty so I’m late leaving and hurtle back down the motorway, frustrated by the sheer volume of traffic, and mindful that I have a car full of slabs… the radio cheerfully tells me that it’s National Stress Awareness Day.  IT’S OK I’M AWARE OF MY STRESS ALREADY!

When I get home Rob has sorted the shuttering, and shows me just how exactly matching the diagonals now are.  Phew.  Now all we need is the concrete… Darren turns up with his little dumper truck (cute or what?) and mum makes them a cup of tea. 

Darren has delivered gravel for the path as well – seven tons of it.  And, whilst I had said ‘put it on the drive in front of the pool cabin’ and he had done exactly that, I had forgotten that I like to swim … I will now have to climb round seven tons of gravel every morning…  Rob is worried that he hasn’t ordered enough concrete and so uses a heap of old breeze blocks to fill up a bit of the base. 

Rob’s two lads turn up to help, and we wait.  The concrete arrives pretty much on time, and the driver likes a challenge, so he tries to drive up the lane.  There’s a terrible screeching of ‘lorry through bushes’ noise and he has to give up.  He backs down the lane, turns the lorry round and backs up to the narrow bit…  Darren drives his dump truck under the funnel thing, and concrete is tipped.  Or at least it would be if the concrete lorry didn’t now have its back end in the air – it won’t tip. 

Darren takes half a load up the lane to the base, and the concrete driver goes back down the lane, turns round (again) and comes back up to a different bit which is flatter. 

Darren comes back, they fill up the tipper, and off he goes…  I run up the lane after him to see how it’s working, and find Rob and the boys shovelling like maniacs after the concrete is tipped.  Some people might say this was an ‘action shot’.  I just call it fuzzy…

I follow Darren back down the lane to make sure it’s working ok, and the driver asks for a shovel, so I run back up the lane, get one and run back down the lane.  Rob phones me on my mobile and asks for a hose, so I run back up the lane again… Darren is busy doing multiple journeys on his tipper…  I follow him back down and use some of the spilt concrete to fill in potholes on the lane – the driver helpfully does some too – lovely chap.  Eventually it’s the last load and the concrete truck leaves – Darren tips it in and the slab is tamped down.  There was enough concrete…  Just!  If the breeze blocks hadn’t gone in we would have been short.  Oops.

Guy arrives just as they’re finishing makes suitably admiring noises.  It’s only 5.30 yet it feels like midnight it’s so dark!  The lights have done their stuff, and it’s all finished.   Apart from the drainage, retaining wall, path, bricks, gravel, step at the front….

We have a base!!  Although we haven't yet seen it in daylight...

Achieved so far: We have a base!!
Hours worked: Zillions.  And lots being stressed.  Well, it was National Stress Awareness Day.  I did my bit.
Plan for the weekend: Keep placing bricks in path line, hopefully get them cemented in place even though the forecast is terrible.  Rob is coming back on Sunday to do the retaining wall.
Pressies: Guy says one of my Christmas presents has arrived – and he was grinning fit to burst.  I am worried…
Purchases: Seven tons of gravel, 4 cubic metres of concrete, 28 square yards of wooden flooring.  And we hired Darren and his tipper truck.
Brick count: I haven’t had to move a brick for 3 days now… am getting withdrawal symptoms.  But still looking in skips.  It’s addictive!
Quote of the week: IT’S NOT BLOODY SQUARE!

On Monday morning as I drive to work I see more bricks slung on the heap of rubbish outside the house that had useless bricks before… I investigate at lunchtime and meet the lovely builders who say I can have as many as I like, and they even help me load the car.  With three of us loading there are a lot of bricks in it.  Probably rather too many… the car is parked on a slope and when I’ve said my goodbyes and removed the handbrake it simply doesn’t move… 

Eventually the wheels start to go round and when I get home and unload the booty I find it’s a grand total of 67 bricks!  The good news is that I now know that that’s limits, weightwise, for a little Smart… bless it.  The boys have said that they’ll be taking a wall down in a few weeks and they’ll pile the bricks up for me where I can see them.  Seems churlish to refuse…

On Tuesday they’ve done it sooner than expected and made a pile of bricks, so I load up on my way home – the pile is enormous so I can only take half of it… I go back for the remainder on Wednesday and swap a chocolate cake for the bricks, and the builders seem suitably happy.  I think we now have more than enough bricks, but then they say there’s yet more wall to come down and would I like the bricks?  Seems churlish to refuse…

I have a half day because Rob the Builder is coming to shift scalpings (rough stone pieces for under the concrete slab), and we’re going to be blocking the lane for a while, so I think I ought to be there – Darren the Digger brings 5 tons of scalpings on his tipper truck, and duly tips them in the road.  I try to help Rob by shovelling barrowloads and running them down the metal tracks on the slope to the shed area, but he says it’s really quite dangerous and he’d rather I didn’t.  I don’t need that much persuading, so I hoover out my poor little car instead – soon it looks like a car instead of a brick van, which is better. 

Rob shifts all 5 tons of scalpings within an hour… amazing!  He’s even raked it over the base area, and it now looks neat and tidy.  Or at least it looks neat and tidy till the beech leaves start falling on it…  He says he’ll be back Friday or Sunday to put up the shuttering, and then on Wednesday for the concrete to be poured – neither of the local concrete companies will deliver up our lane, so he’s going to have to come up with another plan…  Buckets?

On Saturday we construct a flatpack greenhouse at mums in the morning, and then she helps us sweep leaves in the afternoon – we notice there’s a horrible lump in the new path edge, like the Tellytubbies hill, so we unturf it, adjust the clay underneath and then relay the turf.  Or lumps of moss, as we call it.  It’s 3rd November and when I go to the local garage for papers I am waylaid by a snotty lad with a kid’s pushchair saying ‘Penny for the Guy?’  I explain that I have no change and that I’ll see him when I’ve paid for the papers.  As I turn to go into the shop I hear him yell ‘OI, KYLE, GET DOWN HERE I’VE GOT MONEY COMING’.  Bless…  When I go out I have  50p, 20p and 10p pieces…  Because I’m mean and it’s a rubbish guy I give the original lad the 20p, and the one that’s just arrived (he’s the puffing one with the red face) the 10p.  As I get in the car I can hear them comparing notes:  ‘I go’ twenny pee wha’ you ge’?’  ‘10p ‘ow mean is tha’?’  Ungrateful little buggers.

On Sunday it’s the farmer’s market again, then we shoot off to the salvage yard to look at slabs.  We had originally thought we needed 10 slabs (these are to sit in the gravel outside the shed) and then Guy looked at the slabs outside the pool shed and counted 20 in the same sort of area.  We decide we’ll have 20.  As we’re driving along we have a rethink.  20 will cost more than 10.  10 will be enough.  We decide we will ask for 10 slabs and get them delivered.  When we get there we decide we’ll choose our slabs and take half of them home in my car.  If we’d planned this better we’d have gone in Guy’s car (bigger, more space) but we haven’t so we’re in my poor little Smart again…  We rootle round the different pallets of slabs and eventually decide on our odd and occasionally misshapen collection…  Half get loaded into the Smart (4 in the back, one in the front footwell for Guy to rest his feet on) and I’ll pick the rest up on Wednesday when I have a half day for the concrete…  The chap at the salvage yard (It’s called Theodore & Son & Daughters, so we have to presume he’s Mr Theodore) tells us that they’ve been taking up the floor at the old Burberry factory in the valleys and do we need flooring?  Canadian maple at £8 per square yard.  He gives us a sample to take home and have a think about it.  Looks a little grotty, but he says it’ll sand down nicely…  we quite like the idea of having a recycled floor – and it’s local too.  Well, ok, Canadian maple isn’t exactly local, but the factory was before the bigwigs at Burberry sacked everyone and moved toTaiwan…

We’re going to have a gentle afternoon – just fiddling with the first bit of the brick path.  As Darren has done all the hard work with the digger it’ll be a doddle – just a bit of levelling and placing the bricks to get a good line before we cement them in place next weekend.  However, we’re dying to see what the maple floor is like, so Guy sands the sample down... 

...while I knock mortar off a few bricks. 

The pile in the middle are clean, the ones on the far side need cleaning, and the ones nearest probably need cleaning but it was too dark when I unloaded them to see so they need checking.  I find it quite therapeutic whacking bricks with a lump hammer… the maple is gorgeous, and we’re definitely having it for the floor – in the main room of the shed at least.  We may still put cheapo planks in the storage area.

And then we start on the brick line.  We know there’s a small stone slab buried under the grass, but we think it won’t be in the way.  It isn’t really, but then we find one that is.  Guy puts the persuader under one end and shoves.  It isn’t a slab, it’s half a tennis court… it is HUGE.  And it’s in the way.  The only way to move it is to dig away about a square yard of turf and wiggle it out with the persuader. 

Guy does all the hard work and it comes out – it is even MORE HUGE than we thought.  We’ve never seen such an enormous piece of stone – bigger than anything at the salvage yard and probably worth about £40!  We certainly want to use it, but we can’t move it – it’s just too heavy. 

We try to get it into the wheelbarrow, but it just pushes the wheelbarrow out of the way…  We get it upright and think maybe we can ‘wheel’ it across the grass to vaguely near where we want it – but it weighs a ton and is going to sink into the grass on every turn.  I then remember we have a trolley in the shed, so Guy stays holding the slab upright  (if we put it down we may never get it upright again) and I go to get the trolley.  I don’t think it’s been used since I had the business, which explains why it’s under a Workmate, two deckchairs, four large sheets of MDF and two marquees.  We manoeuvre the slab onto the trolley, and try to push.  It doesn’t work – it just sinks into the grass.  We think maybe it’s like one of those flat bed trolleys at B&Q which only work if you pull them, and we turn it round… we pull, it moves!  And then, quite literally, the wheels come off.  Or not actually off, but sort of flattened…  useless trolley.  We have to go back to rolling the slab on its edge and we leave a trail of dents across the grass to the shed area…  We then spend half an hour repairing the crater left in the grass, and another hour trying to get the brick line straight, by which time it’s getting dark and we have to give up.  Damned Fine Slab, though!

Achieved so far: Scalpings on the base, enough bricks collected, grass edge ready for bricking (sort of) and a huge slab removed from under the path.
Hours worked: Actual physical work?  About 2 hours on Sunday shifting that slab, sanding and brick cleaning, 1 on Saturday removing Tellytubby hill, and various bits and bobs loading and unloading bricks and visiting the salvage yard.  As well as all the usual gardeny stuff.
Plan for the week: Concrete slab on Wednesday!  Except Rob the Builder didn’t turn up on either Friday or Sunday to put up the shuttering… Maybe a little phone call to remind him tomorrow?  Yep, I think so…
Pressies: Mum bought us gin for assembling her greenhouse.  Hooray!
Purchases: 10 slabs and a load of scalpings
Brick count: We had 180 at the end of last week.  Then 67 on Monday, 60 on Tuesday and 54 on Wednesday… We now have 361.  After laying out the first 17 bricks of the path today we now know we need just 120 for the path edge.  Oops.  Anna texted me on Sunday afternoon to say she’s seen a vast pile of bricks that have been dumped…  Guy says perhaps not.
Wildlife update: Truly sad news.  Colin (neighbour) told us early in the week that he heard horrible animal screaming noises from down in the wood one night, and thought one of the sheep was being attacked.  He went to investigate the next day and found a badger set had been dug out – presumably local yobbos sending dogs down to kill for ‘sport’.  We’ve not seen the badger since.  We do have a badger visiting for food, but he’s more timid and has a longer tail – definitely not the original.  It’s really horrible to think of what happened to him.  And I am STILL trying to photograph squirrels – to the extent that we think we will have a home produced squirrel Christmas card.  We have decorated the feeder with ivy and maple leaves from mum’s garden - two squirrels visited when I didn’t have the camera handy, then we spent the afternoon gardening and frightened them all off.  Damn.  The evenings are now too dark to photograph anything, so it’ll have to wait till Wednesday (half day) or next weekend.  By which time the ivy will be dead and the maple leaves will have shrivelled.  Hey ho.
Cakes:   One night (can’t remember which) we made two tiers of a wedding cake (fruit), iced the sofa cake, made a chocolate cake for the builders and put a dry stone wall on one edge of the orienteering cake.  Busy time!  There was a fruit cake another night too – I put it in the oven at 9pm so it would be ready at 7.30 the next morning (cool oven, Aga!).  Which would have worked fine if I had remembered to get it out before I reached my desk at work… I had to ring Guy and say ‘HELP THERE’S A FRUIT CAKE IN THE OVEN’ and he went round and rescued it…  Need to invent a better system for not forgetting to get them out.  Like a memory, perhaps?
Quote of the week: ‘We’ll just start the brick line – it won’t take long.’  Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha.  Will we ever learn?