MUDBATH

The day was a bit cloudy and threatened rain. First corner piece going on!



Things are definitely getting a bit grim now, this is a lot more fun when the sun is shining.



We made it! Now lets do one!!



That was a relief to get inside and wash all the mud off.



It's important to look after your tools, give him a bit of a wipe and he will serve you well. I'm thinking about using pyrography to write some runes down the handle. Does anyone know what's Norse / Dwarvish for GARDEN-SMITER?

The Very Foundations

Nick is surveying the scene. The pins and the strings have gone a bit skew-wiff since yesterday.




Here's all the big bits of stone that we're going to make this wall out of. It's a bit higgledy piggledy at the moment but hopefully it will get easier and easier as the stones go into the wall and off the floor.



There are all the smaller bits down the garden, they'll be used in the top parts of the wall when we get round to it. The plastic bags are full of halfbricks from the fireplace smashing which we will use to level the ground on the inside of the wall. The weather was pretty drizzly when we started.



Marking out the foundations, this is the exciting first step so we can get an idea of what the wall is going to look like. At this point, in my head it's nearly finished.



The first two stones are in! They're a pair of beauties aren't they?



Half way through the foundations and it's time to call it a day. At this rate it's going to take a year! It's quality not quantity though I like to think. We're going to get up early tomorrow and have a good full day at it. I reckon we will get 2 or 3 courses done fingers crossed. The string on the right shows what height the ground on the inside will come up to. I think we're going to end up about 2 feet up from that if we've got enough stone.

Genesis of MegaGarden

I've been thinking about rebuilding our garden for a while now. It's on a steep slope so we need a lot of stone. I got 6 tons of the stuff delivered last Friday and managed to get it all piled up in the garden by Monday.



There's the stone!



Somehow we had to get it up the hill at the side of the houses, round the neighbour's gardens and into ours! Thanks to Jim, Stuart, Nick, Zoe, Mum & Dad.



Jim and my Dad smashing the shed to bits. They were totally in their element.



That was a good shade of green.



The fire was causing the concrete patio to explode like fireworks. Much more exciting than your regular campfire.



Mum and Jim keeping a safe distance - it was getting a bit scary.



There's the last of the shed going up. The pile of stone in the front was from Stuarts outside loo, the big bits at the back had been picked for the foundations of the wall and the pile of rubble behind them came out of our Inglenook (but that's another story). The 5 foot painting of giraffes on the Serengeti (creosote on plywood) was accidentally done by me when I was fixing the shed last year. I was thinking of keeping it but we needed more fire for burgers at the end of the day.



Actually we did save one bit of the shed for sentimental value...