Roselea

Category: Garden

  • Toilet in Garage Serviced, and Also Garden Shredder Fitted With New Replacement Cutting Shoe

    Today, for this hot Sunday. We tackled a long overdue job of servicing the toilet in the back of the Garage. There was an overflow problem and it seems to have gotten worse in the last few months. Our water bill said that our consumption has gone up significantly. So we inspected the water inlet valve mechanism and discovered a small lump of foreign material. We cleaned the valve and put it back together and all seems to be back to normal again. But we did have to replace the front plasterboard panel that made up the boxing surrounding the cistern.

    We also glued the old ceramic toilet bowl on one side where there was an old crack from years ago when we rescued this serviceable piece of bathroom ware from the outside toilet as it was then when we brought the property 17 years ago. It probably was the original toilet from when it was constructed way back in the 1945 approximately we think!!
    Then after the Formula 1 Grand Prix, we serviced the garden shredder, our heavy duty machine that chops up garden waste up to to 40mm thick fresh branches or 25mm dry stuff! The shredder needed a new “crunching” aluminium plate shoe that is adjustable to achieve zero gap between the slowly rotating steel blades and this shoe, ensuring that the plant material is chopped into pieces, no matter how small or thin it is. It has a clever trick of crunching the thicker pieces so the woody parts are slit apart to speed up composting.

    The old aluminium plate had a crack across its structure and that is probably what had caused the shredder to not work very well for a while now.
    We tested out the newly serviced machine with a large pile of holly clippings (recently freshly done) and a really old pile of ivy trimmings and produced about 6 very large trug loads of shredded material and a couple of trugs of leaves, all dumped onto our pile of sod at the top of our garden.

  • The Massive Soil Works starts …

    We start the huge task of sorting out the site, ready for the main house to be built upon!

    The soil is a real mess of old garden rubbish, DIY waste and building rubble from the old little cottage, as well as old metal pipes used back in the days when the whole area was a market gardens plus clay sewage pipes running back and forth too!

    We built a large sieve measuring 3feet by 2feet, with an electric powerful off-centre motor (taken from a plate ground compactor) to provide the shake and wiggle. this was mounted into a wooden rramework to hang over the top of the dumper truck to collect the “clean” dirt, to be taken away and tipped onto the mound of soil. The framework was then mounted on to the back of a large flat bed trollet to provide a collecting point for the rubbish and dumped into “ton bags”. These bags were lifted out when full and emptied into the skip.

  • Tidying Up site

    We have been tidying up the whole site ready for the start of phase 3 – the construction of the main house. The site clearance operation has been seeing various old piles of bricks (clay house bricks) being moved and soon the plants too!

    We will have a bonfire to get rid of materials like old shelving which got damaged in the rain, chopped branches and other garden rubbish.

    then the old compost heap will be spread across the whole garden to mix it well before the whole area is shoved up onto the mountain of dirt to clear away the top soil and get down to the sand.

  • Octagonal Flower Bed finished!

    The new raised Flower Bed is finally completed today. The Octagonal shaped constructed of dry bricks (without cement), a mixture of concrete driveway bricks and standard clay bricks. There are 7 layers all together.

    It is about 10 square metre of bedding, surrounding the lid of the spectic tank and air vent pipe.

    This flower bed is a temporary construction to rescue various plants from around the whole site before they were ruined by phase 3 – the contstruction of the main house!