Category: Tidy Up

  • Started Clearing the Interior Ground of House

     This morning, before the rain came along, we started clearing the area inside our building of all the rubbish and equipment plus chairs and table etc. to get the whole surface of the ground all smoothed out, ready for the floor slab to be poured.

    We also mixed up a small quantity of mortar and went around the outside of the Perimeter Wall filling in any voids in the joints and concrete blocks to make a smoother surface for the bitumen paint to stick on nice & strongly and make a good seal.

    We managed to do about 2 hours before the rain came down at lunchtime.

  • Day 2 of Hedge Trim!

     We tackled the second half of the ivy choked blackthorn and hawthorn wild hedge that runs across the bottom of our garden between us and the school field. It was another hot day of cutting and sawing down the side branches and this time, there were some massive ones! One in particular, hanging way over our living quarters, was a big fat 6 inch diameter branch about 12 feet long!

    But we managed to get it all cleared and the whole line looks a lot better now.

    Hedge-Trimming-Day-2-1

    Hedge-Trimming-Day-2-1

    Hedge-Trimming-Day-2-2

    Hedge-Trimming-Day-2-2


    And all the smaller pieces went through the shredding machine and we have filled up a second “ton” bag .. and some!!

    Hedge-Trimming-Day-2-Doubled-up-on-the-shreddings

    Hedge-Trimming-Day-2-Doubled-up-on-the-shreddings

    The hedge will eventually be completely replaced with a proper fencing when the garden and veg/fruit patch is landscaped after the house is built, so it is rather wild with Ivy growing in it and mostly left to its own devices to enjoy nature at its best!!

  • Clearing Away Equipment and Rubbish .. but Diverted to Hedge Trimming Instead!

     We started today on tidying up the area inside the footprint of our house, winding up hose, putting up the ramp over the wall at the back door nearest the garage ..

    Back-door-ramp

    Back-door-ramp

    We loaded up a wheelbarrow with concrete block offcuts to take away to our “rubbish” bag beside the hedge boundary with the school field.

    This is when we were diverted into doing a different task, of trimming back the hedge and balancing up the weight of the whole hedge. We have got to do this as yesterday saw a huge tractor come back and forth on the school field a half a dozen times trimming back our hedge on their side! They sliced and chopped very large branches (well over 50mm / 2 inches in places!) which were hanging over their field with their massive machine, which only took them about 30 minutes to do it all! So we realised that we had to do something similar  our side!!

    The picture below shows you how big some of the overhanging branches we got growing out of our hedge and that is what has disappeared on the school field side!

    Hedge-before-Trimming

    Hedge-before-Trimming

    So we chopped and sliced using our pruning shears and electric sabre saw and then shredded up virtually all the cut-offs and loaded the shredded pieces into a large “ton” bag, filling it right to the top ..

    Hedge-Trimming-a-large-bag-of-shreddings

    Hedge-Trimming-a-large-bag-of-shreddings

    That will compost down very nicely into good quality fiber mulch, ready for our garden and veg patch when we get that done in a year or so time – smile!

    We got half way along the hedge with our efforts today as you can see in the picture  below

    Hedge-Trimming-Day-1

    Hedge-Trimming-Day-1

    And tomorrow we will finish off the remaining of the hedge and have that job done before we have an accident of strong winds causing the hedge to break and dump some of these overhanging branches to crash into our temporary living quarters!! We say “Thank You” School for diverting us when we were not planning this job just yet!!

  • Lovely Fire!

    We had some spare time and it was slightly raining today so we took the opportunity to have get a fire in the incinerator going to get rid of various wooden rubbish around the site.

    May-25th-Bonfire1

    May-25th-Bonfire1

    Like for example, 7 wooden pallets, brambles, rotten OSB boards and off cuts from the garage we have collected over the last few weeks.

    It took longer than we expected and didn’t finish until 8:15 pm and still the fire is going! We will have to go out again before we go to bed to double check that it is ok!!

  • Sunday Quiet Jobs!

    As to our rule, for Sunday, we do quiet jobs around the house and the site so not to disturb our neighbors.

    Today, we did several tasks as follows:

    Camera and TV Aerial

    We decided to take down the heavy wooden old pole that holds up our TV Aerial, Camera and floodlight. It was too heavy for the structure of the building, our front door and storage room door were not braced very strongly, so the whole corner was leaning over, especially during strong winds.

    The floodlight went back up on a much smaller and shorter piece of timber we had lying around, a 50 mm by 50 mm piece.

    New-pole-for-floodlight

    New-pole-for-floodlight

    The TV Aerial went up at the top of the weather equipment pole at the other end of the temporary living quarters and reconnected back into the TV.

    Aerial-Moved

    Aerial-Moved

    Mind you, it seems to have stopped working and at first, we thought it was because the birds had bounced the aerial downwards so it wouldn’t be picking up a strong signal anymore, but having moved it now and pointed it in the general direction that our neighbors’ aerial are pointing, we are still not getting a good signal so something else has gone astray!!

    And finally, we moved the camera so it is much closer to our building area where our house is going to be. We used the original heavy wooden pole but this time, we mounted it on the corner of the garden shed, furthest away from any doors etc. We also braced the tall (3.6 meters – 12 feet) pole with two further diagonal wooden CLS timber.

    New-pole-for-Camera-1

    New-pole-for-Camera-1

    New-pole-for-Camera-2

    New-pole-for-Camera-2


    It is much sturdier, stronger and braced against strong winds to reduce the camera shake so our automatic movie generator will only take videos when something is happening in shot (it took the camera shake as “something is happening” and started recording again and again of nothing!). We are recording at a rate of 5 frames per second to keep the storage demands lower, especially as we are using the full HD “2K” resolution as our image size and quality.

    Garden Shed Roof

    While we were up on the roof doing the camera pole, we noticed that the ridge line was showing cracks in the roofing felt. So we got out our trusty old flashing tape and stuck a small piece down along the ridge, about the middle section of the roof.

    Fence Returns

    The orange builder’s fence, one of those holey plastic mesh things, is now back in place to ward off strays who might come over across our building site and fall down into one of our many holes we may have on the go. It is silly but we have to provide some warnings fencing or signs to keep trespassers off our land, and if they fall down a hole and break a leg, they can sue us for not warning them!! Shake of head!

    Hedge & Flower bed + Brambles!

    We started the tidy up trimming of the hedge we have remaining along the Loke and we will finish that off soon. But we also picked up other bags of clippings, and along with the bag of trimmings from the hedge, went up to the top of the garden to our compost heap. Plus also tidied up bags of bark chippings to a neat pile too.

    We had to rip out a small clump of brambles that managed to grow right in the dark corner, right behind our temporary living quarters, along the Term Gardens fencing, because we needed to gain access at that end to feed the TV Aerial cable through the wall and up to the new location for the aerial just above on the weather pole. That was a tough and spikey job!!

    That’s Concludes our Sunday Quiet Jobs!!

  • The End of the Loke is now Clear of rubble and Gravel!

    As part of our commitment, with our neighbours, to keep the Loke neat and
    tidy, we scooped up the remaining hardcore and ballast gravel and sharp sand
    mixture and moved them off the end of the Loke and down into our building
    area. We scraped and levelled the surface and compacted it all over to make
    it nice and neat.

    End-of-loke-cleared

    End-of-loke-cleared

    We can at last get our old car out again!!

  • Second Day of Fire and Last Bits and Pieces Tidied Up!

    In another glorious sunny day, we had the incinerator going all day today,
    burning up all the old ivy cuttings off our large hedge at the bottom of the
    garden, plus loads of extra trimmings from more ivy around the corner and
    along the Tern Gardens fence line!

    Flames-6ft-High

    Flames-6ft-High

    Cleared-in-front-of-storage-shed

    Cleared-in-front-of-storage-shed


    We moved all the good quality pallets from everywhere and laid them on top
    of the new roof covering our new timber store. We have a dozen of them!! And
    finally, the last bits and pieces lying alongside the garage and garden shed
    were moved inside the timber store, graded by size. We are just about ready
    to tackle the next big job now, the laying down of the sewage pipes from
    various points under the house, to the septic tank.

  • Last Two Covers Installed and a Lovely Fire!

    It was glorious weather today, with a very powerful Sun but it didn’t get
    hot this time as there was a stronger chilly breeze! We managed to assemble
    and install the last two covers over our new timber yard and they are now
    rain proof.

    Covers-finished-and-wood-loaded

    Covers-finished-and-wood-loaded

    Finally, we had a lovely fire in our incinerator to burn up loads of dried
    up cuttings, rotten pallets and other wooden rubbish we had lying around.

    The site is looking much better for our 4 days of effort, with only a few
    bits and pieces left to move over to under the covers like pallets,
    platforms and ramps .. and we will be all done – phew!!

  • Last Pile of Timber Moved and Rain Protection Half Done

    Today, in the lovely sunshine, we moved the last pile of old timber that
    came from the demolition of the old bungalow that was here since around
    1930’s.

    Roof-half-done

    Roof-half-done

    Roofing-the-lane

    Roofing-the-lane


    We spent the rest of the day building rain protection covers to keep much of
    the rain off our timber piles in the swimming lane. We have done 2 of them,
    with 2 left to do.

  • The 89mm CLS Timber is Sorted

    Today, we handled the next pile of timber, the 89mm by 38mm CLS timber. We
    also got our neighbour Terry to come and collect all the unusable pieces for
    his wood burner. He was nicely pleased!

    Timber-stacked-on-lane-1

    Timber-stacked-on-lane-1

    Timber-stacked-on-lane-2

    Timber-stacked-on-lane-2


    Tomorrow, we will move the last pile of “odds and ends” timber and then
    build the rain covering for the whole lot.