Wednesday, September 12, 2012

It's raining!!!!!

First time for 10 days as it happens, and aren't the plants (and Yours Truly) grateful for it?

I woke up at about 05:00 due to the mouse in the roof scratching away, and I could hear a pitter-patter of rain on the skylights here. That was it until lunchtime when we had a quick 5 minutes or so, but this evening at about 22:00 we had a torrential downpour and wasn't it pleasant to hear the water cascading into the water butts?

What was even nicer was that on the lean-to the water was cascading down the roof, into the guttering and out of the hole where it's supposed to go. I can't wait to install the water butts and to start collecting all of this.

But I'm not convinced at all by this wall I'm doing. It's definitely not going to be finished by the weekend, and not by a long way either. It's taking ages.

The problem is that all of the sand/mud mortar behind the large cracks has totally flaked away so it all needs to be raked out completely. This means that some of the stones are loose so they need to be prised out (which causes the wall to sag a little where you've just cemented (because you start from the top and work down, of course) and a slightly larger stone found, and then hammered into the gap until it's solid (which causes the bit of wall that you've just done to rise up) and then wedged in with loose stones, and then cemented in.

And then of course, the bit that you did earlier that you moved about now needs re-cementing. And this is how it goes - it's taking ages, but then again if it had been so easy it would have been done properly long ago.

Then of course I need to keep raking away all of the sand and cement that falls out.

I mean, it's not as if it's difficult - just time-consuming. So I've no idea when it might be finished. The Festival started in Fredericton today so I clearly won't be going to that.

1 comment:

  1. It's currently 79f in my study. I believe it will still be quite warm for the forseeable future here.

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