Disaster Mansion

Not sure if I ever mentioned our garage, but it’s slowly collapsing. All three walls have cracks, some of them about 4″ wide. It’s definitely got a lot worse since we got the house so we thought we should rescue our little sailing boat in case it got destroyed, the only trouble was that the driveway was covered in concrete and rocks which needed to be removed first.

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The skip arrived on Friday and we started on Saturday, it wasn’t a warm day but the weather was perfect as we both soon worked up a sweat. I also jack hammered away a patch of concrete as the start of the drive as this is roughly where the sewer pipe will go and we will need to dig a trench for that sometime soon.

You’ll see that we found three sets of initials on the concrete, no idea who they are though, one looks like “CPT”, another “RT” and the last “DS 97”

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This was a hardcore only skip, so we could only add concrete, stone or bricks, hence why we had to sieve out the leaves and soil from some of the smaller stones. Having a hardcore only skip, keeps the cost down as they can sometimes reuse the rubble for fill.

We pretty much got the boat out as the light was fading on Sunday and then we went to Keegan Ales for a well deserved couple of pints. Next week we’ll put a tarp over the boat to protect it from the elements.

We would pull the garage down, however our architect advised us against and to leave it until we were ready to rebuild it, reason being, it’s on the property line and if we demolished it now and went to rebuild it in five years time, then we might not get planning permission for it.

In response to one of our earlier lawn related posts, friends of Aimee, Maria and Pete, kindly gave us their old mower and when I say old, it’s only three years old and for most of that time it’s been in storage. Maria and Pete have a steep lawn and as this is a push mower they upgraded to a self propelled model. The mower is in great condition and should serve us very well. We’ll probably get it serviced later this month so it will be ready to go this spring. Thank you again Maria and Pete and we look forward to taking you out for beers and burgers at The Anchor or Buns sometime soon. Incidentally for anyone reading this in the Bay Area, Pete designed and built the sound studio labs at Expression college in Emeryville in the late 90’s.

So this weekend we were blessed (or cursed) with warm weather, temperatures hit 65°F (18°C). It was a bizarre shift from full clothing to shorts and t-shirts but it was blessing for working in the garden. Tomorrow temperatures will drop below freezing. Marie told us that this was the warmest day in the area since 1975.

We’d also like to thank Don the Johnson for lending us two cordless chainsaws. I was bit dubious as to how they worked, but I eat my words, they were great, so thank you Don. We only used the smaller model as it was easier to handle up in the trees, also I tried the Dewalt for about 15 seconds and the chain didn’t seem to run well on the blade, nor did it cut well, so possibly a new blade or tune up is needed, which we will look into in return for your generous loan. In the end I think we did a decent job at cutting the trees in a manner which still left the tree looking wonderful.

By the I’m wearing a harness so I can securely rope myself to the tree/ladder. I also secured the ladder to the tree which was fortunate as tree limbs often fall unexpectedly. A lot of the limbs we cut off had a lot of vines holding them up so there were a few occasions when some of the heavy limbs swung back and smacked me on the shoulder or glanced off my head, luckily I was wearing a full face visor. It would be nice to get some advice on how to do this in a safer manner so I’ll ask my arborist friend Win. I think for now, we have pretty cut off the majority of branches and anything else can be left to the experts.

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I know, all we seem to do is play in the garden and climb trees when we should be working on the house. Well it was just too nice a day to stay in doors, a toasty -5°C/23°F (luckily no wind chill) and the sun was shining. We’re pruning the trees to thin the canopy, remove dead wood and remove some of the branches which overhang the lawn. We are being careful in what we remove as we don’t want to spoil the visual aspect of the trees and after we have finished you probably won’t notice that they have been cut at all. I won’t seal the cuts as it seems that trees can look after themselves.

Currently I’m just taking off some of the main branches, leaving 3 – 4 foot stumps on the tree which I’ll trim flush with the main trunk at a later date. The reason I’m leaving long stumps is that when a branch breaks, it can cause tear out, which you can see was what happened in the video below and I don’t want that to happen to the main tree. As for the stumps, I’ll cut them off in shorter lengths, 1 – 2 foot so I can control the wood as it starts to fall. When I was cutting this branch (and it was pretty big) you could hear it going and I didn’t want to be up there when it went. I’m lucky I did go down as that could have been messy as it hit the ladder on it’s descent and the branch went quick.

Still using the trusting Bahco bow saw, but starting to feel that I could do with a powered chainsaw, not sure if I’d buy an electric corded or a gas/petrol one. I’m not looking for a super powerful behemoth of a chainsaw, rather something small and lightweight. We used to have a corded Black and Decker one in the UK which worked great for anything less than about 9″ in diameter. By the way I think this is the first time I have ever used the word behemoth in any written form and if you’re interested it’s origins are:

Behemoth comes from the Hebrew word b’hemah meaning beast.

I also found out that I’ve been pronouncing it incorrectly, shame on me. By the way we did buy a larger Bahco bow saw, however we’ve lost it so if either of us have left it at your house, can we have it back please?

Lastly the stones at the base of the tree aren’t grave stones but they could be, but that’s another story …

I found him while I was jack hammering up the hearth of the chimney we recently removed. I’ll probably chisel him out completely from the concrete tomorrow. There’s also a small ball which you can see in the last photo. I wonder how many decades he’d been trapped?

Note “Hutton” in reverse, this was the local brickyard for which Ponckhockie residents provided a lot of the workforce.

So if you’ve ever wondered where some of your favourite childhood toys went, your parents buried them under a concrete slab, probably …

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