When we knocked off this evening ....

... there were still two bucketsfull of mortar left in the cement mixer.

And so "waste not, want not", I took it round to my house and built up some of the wall of this lean-to that I have been slowly repairing.

You can see that I've built up around the central beam of the roof.

But I had an idea about this. Building with sone uses a lot of cement and you always end up with a filthy mixer full of dried cement and the like so I heaved a bucketful of gravel and a bucketful of water into the mixer to clean it. The gravel will scour the drum and the water will move it round. And I built a very narrow wall on the outside of the wall and a very narrow wall on the inside of the wall, with a large gap in between them. And when I finished and went back to the mixer the drum was quite clean with a load of what looked like very liquid concrete swilling around in it.

I tipped that into a bucket leaving the mixer nice and clean, and took the bucket down to my lean-to and poured the concrete solution into the gap. All nice and runny and you could hear it slurping its way down the fissures in the rocks and soaking into all the dry joints. It'll take a while to set but when it does it will have done wonders for my stone wall. I ought to clean the mixer out like this every night.

As far as the house roof goes, we are making enormous progress and if things hold out we may well be finished on schedule - and won't that be a first?

You can see in the pic that we have built up all of the walls so that they are of the right height and all of the carpentry is now on. It won't be long before the roof is finished, and then we will need to build up the outsides of the walls with a stone facing. Once that's complete we will need to seal the top of the roof into the wall of the house and then just a few more small jobs will finish it off.

Mind you I didn;t want to get up this morning. I had slept through the alarm and was having a very pleasant dream for a change when Terry rang me to make sure I was awake. It's sad when you have dreams like that - you don't ever want them to end.

But it's the weekend and I'm having a weekend off. I reckon that tomorrow I'll go shopping in Commentry and then for a swim at Neris. The warm weather has let me down for the last few days and I haven't been able to have a solar shower. If I'm not careful I'll be picked up on radar soon.