September 16th 2019

[H] Progress over the summer has been slow as we've been distracted by visitors, a family wedding and holidays. We have managed to clear a lot of shrubs and trees ready for groundworks to commence, chopped them up for firewood, dug out some of the front bank, started the terracing, steps and stone walling around the shed area and been up to the local quarry several times with our trailer to collect a tonne at a time of hardcore to make up the base for what will be a paved area next to the shed. And of course each time that tonne needs shovelling out of the trailer into wheelbarrows, carting around the house, tipping out, raking and packing down. It's all been quite physical and, for much of the summer, I've been complaining that it's too hot. 25℃ is all well and good if you're sat in an air-conditioned office or relaxing in your back garden with a cold drink, but if you're outside in the sun doing manual labour it's horrible!

We took the railings off the garage roof terrace, which wasn't quite as simple as it sounds as we had to make sure they didn't crash through the conservatory roof below and getting them safely down to the ground required some rigging up of ropes. And we had to install a new driveway gate on the boundary before we could remove the old gate, stone pillars and railings (we can't leave the garden open to the common for even a few minutes as the sheep would be in like a shot, eating everything!). The new gate gives us a wider opening and easier access for lorries delivering supplies when we get to that stage.

With new gate installed, Malcolm & Helen's dad set about demolishing the old stone pillars:

We had thought we might build the outbuilding over the summer, or at least start it, so that we could use it as a site office/store once the build proper starts. But we discovered that the electricity and water supplies to the existing house (which we're still living in) run underneath where we wanted to dig the foundations. We enquired about having the mains electricity cable shunted over by about six feet so it was out of the way, but Electricity North West quoted us £4k to do it. So we decided not to bother. As it turns out, we wouldn't have got very far as we seem to have been quite busy enough with everything else.

July 29th 2019

[H] Today we received our asbestos survey report and we do have asbestos in the house, which is annoying but not really surprising as apparently most UK houses built pre-1999 have some asbestos in them somewhere. So what made us have an asbestos survey done I hear you ask? Well, once we’d got planning permission we had assumed that we could crack on and start demolishing the existing house. However it transpires that planning permission which includes demolition as part of the application does not actually give you permission to proceed with demolition! We had to submit a Notice of Demolition to the local authority (and pay another fee!) and we were then issued with a set of requirements that we must adhere to, which includes things like not burning any material on site without permission from the Council, having an asbestos survey done and, if any is found, it must be removed by a specialist contractor. So in order to comply with the law and avoid a hefty fine we had to arrange an asbestos survey (and pay yet another fee!). Our asbestos is now recorded on a national register and we need to engage a licensed contractor to have it removed and properly disposed of (which will obviously cost quite a lot and is something we hadn't budgeted for as, being new to all this, it never occurred to us that we might have to deal with asbestos).

A bit of extreme gardening

[H] Helen's parents have been visiting for a few days. Normally they come for a holiday and do lots of walking, this time they were here for three full-on days of hard graft, helping us with what we call 'extreme gardening'. Having created a suitable area for our holding bed/veg plot, the task this week was to fill it with soil. Now we could just go out and buy several tonnes of topsoil but there wouldn't be any fun in that! And we have got quite a lot of soil in the garden already, it's just full of stones and rocks such that it's impossible to get a shovel into the ground. So in comes Kubi, our trusty digger. Add to that an old garden railing, a couple of scaffolding planks, some rope and a wooden board and you have a giant sieving machine.

Kubi digs out the ground, gently empties it at the top of the chute and, as it rolls down, the soil falls through the holes into the strategically placed wheelbarrow and all the rocks and rubble end up at the bottom on the wooden board. Then you just need some man (and woman!) power to barrow the soil away to the veg plot area and shovel up the rocks into another wheelbarrow and dump that somewhere else. It took a bit of head scratching and some trial runs to perfect the set-up but we soon got a good system going mainly thanks to Helen's mum who seemed to come up with all the good ideas and solutions to teething problems. It also required some fairly precise manoeuvring of the digger as one false move of the arm could (and did!) easily dismantle our slightly precarious sieve. But Malcolm quickly got the hang of it and we were flying by the end of the first day. It was hot, dusty and hard work and we must have processed several tonnes of earth, but we now have an area approximately 7m x 4m of beautifully sieved soil, deep enough for eventually growing potatoes, parsnips, carrots, etc. Couldn't have done it without the extra workforce - thanks Mum & Dad!

Watch our giant sieving machine in action: