Files and Records

Category: Lincolnshire Diaries

  • The Lincolnshire Diaries – Part 2, Cometh the hour, cometh the shed

    It’s here!  It’s built!  It’s in the garden and it’s full of stuff!  Well, only about 1/3 full so far but there’s plenty of stuff needing to go in there.

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    It looks better than this now, Thing5 and I painted it green yesterday morning, finished the trim and everything…

    And we started tackling the garden this weekend.  Massive fun for everyone, all the kids got stuck in removing years of excess ivy, brambles and general overgrowth.  We wrecked one old fork and seriously bent one new one removing the first of the bramble roots.  Seriously, some of these things have main stalks 2 inches in diameter and there’s over a dozen of them.  Not sure the holly tree would survive removal of them, so any tips and hints on removing them gratefully received!

    Over course of the afternoon, we turned the garden from this:

    IMG_20131130_152835to this…

    IMG_20131208_132248We found 2 decent garden chairs, took a huge sack of rubbish to the skip (all broken stuff, several chairs, one scooter, a load of wire and the random stuff found under the nettles) and decided the best way to get rid of the remainder was a good, old-fashioned, bonfire.  Well, either that or endless trips to the recycling centre.

    Turns out dried holly leaves make for an incredible firestarter!

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    And all that was left of was a pile of ashes.  Nice.

    Next step, some minor additions to my gentleman’s toolkit.  I’m thinking large axe, chainsaw and wheelbarrow…

     

     

  • The Lincolnshire Diaries – Part 1, pre-Shed

    Well, the inside jobs are just about finished.  A few more shelves to put up, one or two ornaments to hang (well, 1 gecko, 2 birds and a fish) and we’re done!  Get the rest of the boxes out of storage and we’re golden.  Then it’s on to the outside!

    I have built loft beds, put up more shelves than I care to think of and inhaled more brick dust than is likely to be good for me.

    This is by way of part blog post and part to-do list.

    Having been helpfully advised that copper pipes are valuable and therefore might get nicked, I’ve got to box the gas pipes in along the side of the house and make a start of what we’ve dubbed “Bramble Corner” – a forbidding, untended maze that I swear I’m going to find sleeping beauty at the end of.  I mean in theory, there’s a boundary wall with the neighbours at the back there, but I’ve not seen in yet!  To one side of Bramble Corner is a conifer hedge that hasn’t seen a trimmer in years, by the looks of it.

    All of this work to come means only one thing:  I’m getting a shed!

    I’ve never had a shed before.  Even my Dad never had a shed – we had outbuildings, barns and the like when I was growing up, a garage in previous houses to keep the mower and the bikes at the back.  But now, no garage but a decent-sized slab of hard-standing to put a shed on.

    Somewhere to keep those jars of screws, the tools (of which I’ve managed to amass a decent collection including a rather beefy sledgehammer, a decent metal wrecking bar and a G-clamp that’s big enough to hold a bed frame together), the garden tools, the bikes, scooters and the like!  Somewhere to put the demijohns of homebrew while the wine matures!  Somewhere, in short, to do Stuff.

    Stuff is, unfortunately, a while away.  There probably won’t be any wine in there until the spring.

    The garden was once cared for, that much is obvious from the hard-standing and the shape of the beds, the original planting that has now gone wild.  Now, though, there are miles of brambles to extract, self-seeding trees to dig up, a lawn to mow, a hedge to trim…   It will look good again.  Just not soon.

    On the social side of things, life is looking pretty good.  The local school PTA meets in the pub and thanks to church I attended the Ness Group “Gentleman’s Breakfast” this morning – learned a little about the Knights Templar in this area, met some of the folks from the surrounding area and had a full fried breakfast into the bargain.  And finally, we’ve done my first run here.  Just a 2-miler out of the village and back, but things must be looking good if the running shoes can come out again.