As this is a cold month I would normally be working inside to stay as warm as possible but a lot of the work due is now outside. So on the drier, warmer days, I have managed to take down the rest of the wall on the driveway, to dig out the foundations and to start re-building the wall.
Work continued on the out building. First stage was to protect the ducting's that ran into the building by casting a concrete footing over them. This allows me to build the wall on top with out crushing them.
The next stage was to lay a building fabric to let the water flow through the wall but to stop the soil from washing into the wall and filling all the tiny voids.
Then finally onto the building of the actual wall with old stone that I have kept in storage.
Clearly I've not quite had enough of dry stone walling so I started another project, another wall on the driveway! While I have a supply of stone it seemed a good job to get done. This was going to be a slow one with the cold weather and the fact that the old wall was mainly concrete and rubble, which looks like it was an old chimney. I was recovering less than 30% of the wall for re-use.
As the weather was kind to me I continued to close down the garden for winter. Preserving and cooking all the produce that had come out of the garden. I wanted to tidy up a bit of the garden around one of the out buildings, due to the difference in ground level I needed to put in a meter high dry stone wall. So I started to get the foundations dug.
I was also gifted a few logs which I needed to collect from a garden in the village.
This was a busy month. My brother had a opportunity to come down and work on site again, as there were no current Covid restrictions and him not being too busy with his own business. Having a second pair of hands makes different jobs possible.
So we were able to do the path around the house. This was going to be hand mixed as we could not see how to get ready mix into that area without the expense of a pump. Midge was also able to take the week off and help with the mixing. This job went very well except for fact the weather forecast was for dry weather and clearly didn't turn out that way - we had to build a shelter quickly to stop the rain on the freshly laid path!
As this job went so well we also had time to hire a digger and dumper to sort out the ramp down into the undercroft. This meant building a riddle to get most of the soil out of the stone pile in the front garden and enabled us to move soil from other storage locations around the garden too.
The Garden continues to produce very well, we picked two wheel barrows of potatoes - about 70kg!
We had finally managed to get a delivery date for the fence posts which i had been trying to source since June, so we started the prep. We wanted to keep going on the work as my brother was able to travel at that moment and there was talk in the media of a second lock down on its way. I hired a breaker for the week and dug the holes for the fence post. The first day lead me into a false sense of security of how easy this was going to be, getting 4 holes dug in the day. The next day was a lot slower, managing only 2 and this was the way it was to continue. There was 15 holes to dig in total.
I then managed to dig another meter deep hole for a separation tank for the surface water drains before it goes into the soak away. This is to collect any debris and sediment, which I can already confirm is working nicely.
The fence then went on hold as there are no fence posts of the right size, the supplier suggested its unlikely they will arrive before January.
