With several large stacks of grid down the side of the house, the nature of my weekend was rather dictated to me this weekend...crack on with sorting out the front garden!!!
I forgot to take a proper before photo but you can see from the estate agents pic when we purcahsed the house that the front garden was a bit of a mess. Next to the driveway there were several paving slabs thrown down to allow a second car to park on the garden, these had obviously been used a for quite some time and had sunk into the dirt a fair bit, the whole thing was uneven and the grass patchy.
Also, the front corner by next doors fence was a strange lump in the ground, (you can just about see it in the photo). It turned out to be a rubble sack about a 1/4 full of sand which had been left over when the neighbours had block paved their front garden and driveway, the previous occupant of our house asked if he could have it and then left the bag in the garden and didn't do anything with it...for about 12 years!!!
I had a go at digging it out but it was so well embedded and grown over there was no way I'd have managed to move it. As luck would have it my neighbours had a mini digger in a few weeks ago to do some work in their back garden and they very kindly used it to pull the bag out and we got rid of it!
So, Saturday my little boy went off to my parents for a few hours so my girlfriend and I could geto to work. We started by lifting and moving the slabs, the measuring and pegging out edges so we knew the area we needed to dig out.
Then we began lifting the turf. This was a real pain of a job as the ground was so compacted from cars parking on it that the turf was really well bedded down and hard to lift. It doesn't help that the soil is very clayey and in the dry weather has gone very hard. Methodical cutting with a lawn edger and then lifting with a spade got the job done but it took a very long time.
It also didn't help that we had very little space to put the lifted turf anywhere, so we loaded the car and took what we could to the local tip and carried on.
Thankfully, being a nice hot day, an icecream van came past so after a couple of lemonade lollies each we had enough energy to get all the turf lifted and we could begin on breaking the ground up ready to dig down to our depth of 100mm...
This also proved to be hard work due to the hardness of the ground and the presence of a lot of lumps of broken brick etc that stopped the fork going into the ground at all but we made a decent start before out little man was delivered back to us and the work for the day stopped.
I had hope to really get on again on Sunday but unfortunately my girlfriend spent most of Saturday night being sick and Sunday was laid up in bed, leaving me to entertain our little monster!!!
Eventually the monster grew tired and fell asleep so I got back out into the garden with my trusty garden fork and continued breaking up the soil. As luck would have it my neighbour loaned me a pick axe which sped the job up rather though was much much harder work than the fork!!! So now the ground is pretty much all broken up ready to be dug out and taken to the tip!
My Dad has gotten hold of loads of heavy duty sacks for me from his work so tonight I intend to bag up as much of the soil as possible ready for the tip, then at the weekend I'll hopefully be able to get rid of it all and we'll be able to get the edge boarding in place ready for the geotextile material (which I need to order today) and the aggregate in place!
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