Life must be filled up

I’ve missed out a stage here because work is ahead of schedule, hurrah! At the end of the working day yesterday, heavy duty fleece was laid and weighed down with my bins and anything else available. It was very windy and rained later. This morning we had a delivery of ‘number one rocks’, which were spread around and tamped down. The first photo shows what that looks like.



At the end of today’s work, I was just in time to catch the lorry unloading gravel. Quite a lot of this has now been spread around, so we must be nearly there.

A horrible day yesterday becaue I was very let down by the carpet fitter. Luckily for me the builders didn't want me to be left in chaos, so they came round quite late and brought ( ta-da! )

The dining room has been out of use for over a week and will remain so for a while. The sitting room is half full of boxes. Sigh. It's not that it's such a big job, just that it takes a man here, a man there; never one concentrated burst of activity. This morning I went to inspect the painting of the dresser I wrote about here. This is what the top half currently looks like. ( photo )

At last the tree surgeons turned up today to give the garden its annual haircut. I usually book in August and get them Christmas Eve but this broke all records. Luckily they picked what seemed like the first dry, sunny day for weeks but oh! that wind! Anyway, we are now trim. I had to warn them to be careful of our wall. It seems that after all the wall is dangerous and might fall over. Not because it's old, not because the foundations were inadequate, nor because of the clay soil. The reason for its fragility, dear readers, is that when the blankety builders put up the new houses they dug away on that side of the wall, so reducing the foundations. Our builder wants to take it down and rebuild using lime mortar. We haven't had a quote but it's highly unlikely we can afford that and we'll probably have to have a horrid fence like everyone else (oh, what a giveaway). Ever since The Secret Garden became my favourite book as a child, my ideal has been a garden with a wall round it. Heigh ho.