Man vs root

The very good news is that all the portable heaters have made a huge difference to the condensation on the windows. This morning is the first morning for a couple of weeks that there hasn’t been pools of water on every window sill, in fact most sills were dry! Thank god for that as the oak was beginning to go black and the putty was beginning to go soft and disintegrate on some windows… A group effort, with thanks to the people of Radway and Colin 🙂

Tom, George and Dan are back today thankfully. Tom and George are filling in the land drain at the front with pea gravel and hardcore, and laying the cement foundations for the retaining wall for the lawn.

Dan is finishing off the architrave around the new back door frame in the sitting room, scribing the edges to fit the stone so that it seals the door frame.

Many, many wheel barrows of pea gravel are being shifted this morning!

I took a trip out to Red Horse Vale Fuels & Country Supplies to buy the weed barrier membrane for the path and drive (thank you James Holloway for the tip), and order the slate chippings.

The options are the purple (above) and the blue (previous picture) and the blue is definitely my preference. It has the same blue and orange of our Hornton stone so will be perfect.

When I get back the hardcore has been laid and the cement footings poured for the retaining wall. Hmm, wet concrete, it’s crying out for some graffiti…

Tom repairs our neighbours stone wall that we partially took down to lay the land drain, and has partially fallen down over the years.

This is a lot better than it was.

When we first moved into the house we removed 3 Leylandii trees that were blocking the light from our house and the neighbour’s garden. One was here at the corner of the front gate and was huge (you can see it in the old photo of the house at the top of the page). Its roots remain with one very big bastard just where Tom needs to lay the foundations for the retaining wall, so it needs to come out. George had a go first, there isn’t much that he can’t conquer.

But the root wasn’t giving up, Tom had a go too, trying to split the root with a massive chisel.

But the chisel got stuck, so Scoopy was called upon to free the chisel!

Eventually George won and this is the full root that he removed! It extended right across the drive and had many other roots branching off it. It had barely rotted in the 3+ years since the tree was removed.

The finished foundations for the wall.

Dan is repairing the second step (tread) on the staircase. The front of the tread had been repaired with filler and looked awful as it was a completely different colour to the elm.

Dan has cut the filler out and will be repairing it with a slither of one of the old elm floorboards that we have left over. Luckily there is one that is just long enough to do this.

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