Fourteen
The week starts well, when one of the girls at work emails me to say do I know the local GP practice is being demolished (it was a lovely new building that burnt to a crisp last year when somebody chucked a cigarette butt into a waste paper bin, and it has been roofless since) and there is a BIG pile of bricks… No more incentive is needed and off I whizz… Yes, lots of bricks, but sadly a completely hideous colour – now, I know we want free bricks and it seems churlish to refuse freebies on the basis of ‘the colour’s not quite what we’re after’ but these are, frankly, purple. Maybe they’ll build a prettier building next time. However, the good news is that Guy has found a supply of discarded bricks near his office when walking Blunkett at lunchtime.
Things look up on Tuesday as Guy phones me when I’m on my way home and says he’s in a field looking at a pile of bricks. I make a detour and join him and, sure enough, he’s in a field looking at a pile of bricks. Or, rather, a heap. Hundreds and hundreds of used bricks, mostly with soft mortar attached (perhaps that was why whatever it was fell down?) and yellowish, but perfectly acceptable. We reckon we’ll liberate a few, and make a start. Guy has been home and changed into dog walking gear which is fair enough, but I’m still in my work clothes (high wedge heel boots, calf length skirt, nice Italian leather jacket). As I hitch my skirt up over the style I do feel a bit like a Jane Austen character, walking briskly across fields in a longish skirt to ensure a healthy complexion.... However, I think it’s a fair bet that none of her heroines were carrying bricks…. As we’re lugging our booty back down the track to the car, a car pulls up and the driver gets out. Despite the fact that we’re only retrieving dumped bricks, we both feel guilty. I lob my bricks as one into the bracken; Guy has the presence of mind to put his down in a neat pile. We hold hands and saunter down the track, looking as casual as we can manage (tricky in hugely unsuitable heels). The bloke calls out to see if we’re ok, and wonders if we’ve broken down. We say we’re fine thanks, just parked for a minute. Quite what he makes of a bloke in walking gear and a bird in totally unwalking gear, we don’t know. He leaves, we retrieve the bricks. I am impressed by just how far I was able to lob three bricks into the bracken. Perhaps this could become a new Olympic sport?
On Thursday I’ve spotted better bricks at the house near to work which is being renovated – the one with the Wrong Kind of Bricks before – where I’ve now spotted the Right Kind of Brick. I go and chat to the builders who agree the majority are the wrong kind of bricks – except one which is ok, so I come away with one brick. But they do say they’re about to knock down a bit of garden wall and I can have the bricks – they’ll stack them where I can see them on my way past in the mornings.
On Friday things improve again – another house on my way to work has a massive pile of bricks and rubble outside, so at lunchtime I go and bang on the door and ask if I can have the bricks. They couple are delighted that some mug is going to take them away, and I load up the car – I pile in as many bricks as I think my little Smart can carry, filling up the back and the front footwell. (No, not the driver’s side - that would be Plain Silly). And the day improves still further when Rob the Builder says he’ll be with us at 8.30 on Saturday morning unless it’s raining. That’s ok – the forecast is for DRY!
The forecast is wrong. It’s persisting down on Saturday morning – so much so that I get soaked when I go out to fetch papers. I decide Rob’s not coming and text Guy (who is stuck at his house feeling queasy with a dodgy tummy bug) to say there’s no hurry to come down as nothing’s happening. At 8.45 Rob turns up saying the rain’s not that bad and he may as well make a start. Luckily I’ve spotted his wheelbarrow and shovel so I go out to say hi. Just as well, as he was about to start digging in The Wrong Place. We have marked out the area with 4 corner pegs. For some reason (needs glasses, maybe?) he has only seen the front two, and was going to dig forward from those, putting the shed virtually in the middle of the lawn, not back from the pegs unobtrusively into the wood. Cracking start, eh? I point him in the right direction and we start discussing levels. As it’s now going to be where we want it and not where he thought, there is more digging out to do than Rob thought. He looks sadly at his little shovel, then asks if I happen to know where we can hire a digger. Of course I do – Darren the Digger, our hero from the pool build! I ring Darren then pass the phone to Rob so they can sort out a day in the week to do digging stuff. I only hear Rob’s end of the conversation:
“Hiya butt*, alright?”
“How’re you fixed this week then?”
“That busy, eh?”
“How about today then? Sort of now? Couple of hours?”
“Fine, you know where it is, I’ll pass you back to Sarah”
SHIT! That means instead of a nice polite bit of digging, we’re about to call in a mini JCB and totally decimate the area. SHIT! While we wait for Darren the Digger to arrive, I phone Guy to say ‘you know I said there was no need to rush, well now there is, you might want to get here SOON because you won’t want to miss all the fun’. Rob and I remove a section of fence so that Darren will be able to get his digger into the garden/scrubland/whatever and then he arrives… I go out to greet him and explain that he needs to drive through where the fence used to be and down a fairly sheer drop on the other side. I bound on ahead to point out where, and meet my neighbour, Lynne, in her car and in a hurry, trying to go the other way on the single track lane. I flag her down and explain that we won’t be long, but Darren has to manoeuvre carefully and gingerly through the fence and I turn to point at him – to find that he has turned and driven through the gap when I was looking the other way – he just drove straight down the sheer drop. Brilliant! Lynne goes off and I find Darren has already met Rob and they are having a buildery chat:
‘So it’s starting from here to about a foot off back there and then all over to the side, put it behind and we’ll level it to the bank after, alright?’
‘Fine, butt, alright'.
And that’s it… Darren gets digging and Rob and I stand and admire. Guy arrives and I make a round of coffees, and the digging continues. There is an ENORMOUS pile of earth behind where the shed will be, and mud everywhere. Rob the Builder didn’t know Darren the Digger, but it seems they are to become firm friends. Rob is especially impressed when Darren’s mobile rings and he simply removes his ear defenders, puts the phone to his ear, replaces the ear defenders and then carries on the conversation and the digging simultaneously. A man who can multitask! Hooray! There’s not much to do except stand and admire, and discuss drainage… (Yes, that's me in the yellow wellies. Stylish, eh?)
Then Rob has the bright idea that, as we have a man and a digger, why don’t we get him to dig out the path where the gravel is going to go at the same time? Bloody good idea or what? We put this to Darren who is happy to do more digging – I point out that there is a row of bricks between the lawn and the flower bed and I’d like the path a digging scoop wide off the bricks, but not to move the bricks. So he does exactly that – a scoop wide all the way along, just against the bricks but not moving them. Skill or what?
However, we have to dump all the earth somewhere, so we start up a convoy of wheelbarrows – Darren scrapes off 4” of turf and earth, turns to put it in a barrow, we wheel it off and dump it in the wood, then he does another load for the next person. Rob has brought his own barrow, and we have two ourselves (one decent, one crap) so even poor queasy Guy gets to join in… We lose count of the barrowloads, but it must have been several tons – we make a heap in the wood and then when he’s finished scraping out the path, Darren flattens it and drives over it with his mini-digger. In six months we won’t even know it was there as the woodland will have grown back up through it.
And that’s it! Darren and Rob discuss scalpings for under the base, and it is agreed that Darren’s flat bed tipper truck is the very thing for bringing them in (what would Rob have done without him, eh?) and Darren trundles off down the lane. Rob packs up his (by now very soggy) barrow and industrial radio, and he goes too. Guy and I are left surveying the utter devastation that used to be our garden.
Guy says it’s a good job the planning chap can’t see it… We troop soggily indoors for lunch – the drizzle hasn’t ever let up. The cats are sat smack up against the Aga complaining that it is cold and wet. They haven’t even been OUTDOORS!
After lunch Guy (by now knackered from his exertions) sits quietly with the paper while I go back outside and put turf (which we saved from the scraping) on the worst bits of the mud beside the ‘path’ and get even muddier in the process… it’s clay round our way, and with the drizzle my boots just get clogged until they way about half a stone each.
Eventually I give in and go back indoors for a long, hot soak in the bath. For the first time since I was about 6 years old I leave a tidemark round the tub… But soon I’m clean, dry, warm and have painted my nails a girly pink just to make properly sure I feel girly.
I need to go to Asda for odds and ends, so Guy comes along for the ride through the drizzle and we take a slight detour through a local village so I can show him a nice pile of bricks. We have a closer look from the car and find that they are beauties… so I go and knock on the door. No answer, but a neighbour comes round looking for the houseowner too. He asks if I know where he is and I explain that I’ve only come to see if he wants his bricks. The neighbour says ‘technically they’re my bricks now’ (no, we don’t understand it either) and explains that he’ll be keeping the clean ones. He is utterly amazed that I am driving round looking for bricks (er, why? Doesn’t everyone?) and asks how many I want. ‘Ooh, about 50’ I say airily. ‘Go on, then, you can have 50 of those’ he says. Result!! I knock excitedly on the window to Guy and say ‘hey, guess what? We can have 50!’ and he (rather wearily, I think) gets out of the car to help. We keep count as we load the car, but lose the numbers somewhere after 40. So we say ‘two more each and that’s it’. Besides, the car is full, the drizzle hasn’t relented and we are, again, soaked.
On Sunday we do, er, nothing shed related. Actually, that’s not strictly true, because we meet up with Anna and Pete at the Cowbridge Food Fair and Anna gives us a present of 9 bricks… That’s my kind of present! We do a bit of cake decorating (stone wall and a wooden fence for the orienteering cake) when we get home – we’ve got four cakes (including a wedding cake) to do by the end of November. Eek. Don’t people know we have a shed to build??
Achieved so far: We have a space where a base will go, and a space where a path will go! And we have a lot of bricks…
Hours worked: From 8.45 to 1.30 then from 2.30 – 4 plus the bricks on Saturday. And I think we have to count the ‘getting clean and dry stages’ too which bumps it up a bit.
G&Ts consumed: Several. Well, all that digging had to be celebrated…
Plan for the week: Scalpings to arrive, be put down and jumped on, then shuttering to go up, concrete next Saturday. Good grief – by this time next week we should have a BASE!
Pressies: 9 bricks from Anna. My kind of girl.
Purchases: We bought a man and a digger. Well, hired them really.
Brick count: 59 from last week, 14 from the field that Guy found, 1 from the house renovation (big deal), 58 Friday lunchtime, and 48 (we counted them as we unstacked the car) from the house where the neighbour oddly owned the bricks. Anna’s 9 were already counted… So that’s now 180 bricks!! And all for free!! The aim is to get to 200, which should be a doddle – even though our neighbour has decided that he needs all the bricks that he has. How many did we need? About 150. Yes, ok, I got carried away…
More about bricks: On last Friday’s ‘Have I Got News For You’, the odd publication’ they take headlines from at the end was … wait for it…. ‘Brick Collector Monthly. I kid you not! See, I’m not the only one…
Wildlife update: The badger is now visiting every night for his diet of overcooked fruit cake and peanuts. And he’s stopped digging up the garden. One night I saw him with his mate, which I presumed was his female partner, until I realised ‘she’ was as big as ‘he’, so maybe it’s another male. Excellent! Gay badgers in the garden!!
Fascinating fact: Our local parish hall is having a ‘halloween party’ with a live band next Saturday night. The band’s name? The Sheds.
*Butt = Welsh term of endearment, like ‘mate’. Very valleys!
Things look up on Tuesday as Guy phones me when I’m on my way home and says he’s in a field looking at a pile of bricks. I make a detour and join him and, sure enough, he’s in a field looking at a pile of bricks. Or, rather, a heap. Hundreds and hundreds of used bricks, mostly with soft mortar attached (perhaps that was why whatever it was fell down?) and yellowish, but perfectly acceptable. We reckon we’ll liberate a few, and make a start. Guy has been home and changed into dog walking gear which is fair enough, but I’m still in my work clothes (high wedge heel boots, calf length skirt, nice Italian leather jacket). As I hitch my skirt up over the style I do feel a bit like a Jane Austen character, walking briskly across fields in a longish skirt to ensure a healthy complexion.... However, I think it’s a fair bet that none of her heroines were carrying bricks…. As we’re lugging our booty back down the track to the car, a car pulls up and the driver gets out. Despite the fact that we’re only retrieving dumped bricks, we both feel guilty. I lob my bricks as one into the bracken; Guy has the presence of mind to put his down in a neat pile. We hold hands and saunter down the track, looking as casual as we can manage (tricky in hugely unsuitable heels). The bloke calls out to see if we’re ok, and wonders if we’ve broken down. We say we’re fine thanks, just parked for a minute. Quite what he makes of a bloke in walking gear and a bird in totally unwalking gear, we don’t know. He leaves, we retrieve the bricks. I am impressed by just how far I was able to lob three bricks into the bracken. Perhaps this could become a new Olympic sport?
On Thursday I’ve spotted better bricks at the house near to work which is being renovated – the one with the Wrong Kind of Bricks before – where I’ve now spotted the Right Kind of Brick. I go and chat to the builders who agree the majority are the wrong kind of bricks – except one which is ok, so I come away with one brick. But they do say they’re about to knock down a bit of garden wall and I can have the bricks – they’ll stack them where I can see them on my way past in the mornings.
On Friday things improve again – another house on my way to work has a massive pile of bricks and rubble outside, so at lunchtime I go and bang on the door and ask if I can have the bricks. They couple are delighted that some mug is going to take them away, and I load up the car – I pile in as many bricks as I think my little Smart can carry, filling up the back and the front footwell. (No, not the driver’s side - that would be Plain Silly). And the day improves still further when Rob the Builder says he’ll be with us at 8.30 on Saturday morning unless it’s raining. That’s ok – the forecast is for DRY!
The forecast is wrong. It’s persisting down on Saturday morning – so much so that I get soaked when I go out to fetch papers. I decide Rob’s not coming and text Guy (who is stuck at his house feeling queasy with a dodgy tummy bug) to say there’s no hurry to come down as nothing’s happening. At 8.45 Rob turns up saying the rain’s not that bad and he may as well make a start. Luckily I’ve spotted his wheelbarrow and shovel so I go out to say hi. Just as well, as he was about to start digging in The Wrong Place. We have marked out the area with 4 corner pegs. For some reason (needs glasses, maybe?) he has only seen the front two, and was going to dig forward from those, putting the shed virtually in the middle of the lawn, not back from the pegs unobtrusively into the wood. Cracking start, eh? I point him in the right direction and we start discussing levels. As it’s now going to be where we want it and not where he thought, there is more digging out to do than Rob thought. He looks sadly at his little shovel, then asks if I happen to know where we can hire a digger. Of course I do – Darren the Digger, our hero from the pool build! I ring Darren then pass the phone to Rob so they can sort out a day in the week to do digging stuff. I only hear Rob’s end of the conversation:
“Hiya butt*, alright?”
“How’re you fixed this week then?”
“That busy, eh?”
“How about today then? Sort of now? Couple of hours?”
“Fine, you know where it is, I’ll pass you back to Sarah”
SHIT! That means instead of a nice polite bit of digging, we’re about to call in a mini JCB and totally decimate the area. SHIT! While we wait for Darren the Digger to arrive, I phone Guy to say ‘you know I said there was no need to rush, well now there is, you might want to get here SOON because you won’t want to miss all the fun’. Rob and I remove a section of fence so that Darren will be able to get his digger into the garden/scrubland/whatever and then he arrives… I go out to greet him and explain that he needs to drive through where the fence used to be and down a fairly sheer drop on the other side. I bound on ahead to point out where, and meet my neighbour, Lynne, in her car and in a hurry, trying to go the other way on the single track lane. I flag her down and explain that we won’t be long, but Darren has to manoeuvre carefully and gingerly through the fence and I turn to point at him – to find that he has turned and driven through the gap when I was looking the other way – he just drove straight down the sheer drop. Brilliant! Lynne goes off and I find Darren has already met Rob and they are having a buildery chat:
‘So it’s starting from here to about a foot off back there and then all over to the side, put it behind and we’ll level it to the bank after, alright?’
‘Fine, butt, alright'.
And that’s it… Darren gets digging and Rob and I stand and admire. Guy arrives and I make a round of coffees, and the digging continues. There is an ENORMOUS pile of earth behind where the shed will be, and mud everywhere. Rob the Builder didn’t know Darren the Digger, but it seems they are to become firm friends. Rob is especially impressed when Darren’s mobile rings and he simply removes his ear defenders, puts the phone to his ear, replaces the ear defenders and then carries on the conversation and the digging simultaneously. A man who can multitask! Hooray! There’s not much to do except stand and admire, and discuss drainage… (Yes, that's me in the yellow wellies. Stylish, eh?)
Then Rob has the bright idea that, as we have a man and a digger, why don’t we get him to dig out the path where the gravel is going to go at the same time? Bloody good idea or what? We put this to Darren who is happy to do more digging – I point out that there is a row of bricks between the lawn and the flower bed and I’d like the path a digging scoop wide off the bricks, but not to move the bricks. So he does exactly that – a scoop wide all the way along, just against the bricks but not moving them. Skill or what?
However, we have to dump all the earth somewhere, so we start up a convoy of wheelbarrows – Darren scrapes off 4” of turf and earth, turns to put it in a barrow, we wheel it off and dump it in the wood, then he does another load for the next person. Rob has brought his own barrow, and we have two ourselves (one decent, one crap) so even poor queasy Guy gets to join in… We lose count of the barrowloads, but it must have been several tons – we make a heap in the wood and then when he’s finished scraping out the path, Darren flattens it and drives over it with his mini-digger. In six months we won’t even know it was there as the woodland will have grown back up through it.
And that’s it! Darren and Rob discuss scalpings for under the base, and it is agreed that Darren’s flat bed tipper truck is the very thing for bringing them in (what would Rob have done without him, eh?) and Darren trundles off down the lane. Rob packs up his (by now very soggy) barrow and industrial radio, and he goes too. Guy and I are left surveying the utter devastation that used to be our garden.
Eventually I give in and go back indoors for a long, hot soak in the bath. For the first time since I was about 6 years old I leave a tidemark round the tub… But soon I’m clean, dry, warm and have painted my nails a girly pink just to make properly sure I feel girly.
I need to go to Asda for odds and ends, so Guy comes along for the ride through the drizzle and we take a slight detour through a local village so I can show him a nice pile of bricks. We have a closer look from the car and find that they are beauties… so I go and knock on the door. No answer, but a neighbour comes round looking for the houseowner too. He asks if I know where he is and I explain that I’ve only come to see if he wants his bricks. The neighbour says ‘technically they’re my bricks now’ (no, we don’t understand it either) and explains that he’ll be keeping the clean ones. He is utterly amazed that I am driving round looking for bricks (er, why? Doesn’t everyone?) and asks how many I want. ‘Ooh, about 50’ I say airily. ‘Go on, then, you can have 50 of those’ he says. Result!! I knock excitedly on the window to Guy and say ‘hey, guess what? We can have 50!’ and he (rather wearily, I think) gets out of the car to help. We keep count as we load the car, but lose the numbers somewhere after 40. So we say ‘two more each and that’s it’. Besides, the car is full, the drizzle hasn’t relented and we are, again, soaked.
On Sunday we do, er, nothing shed related. Actually, that’s not strictly true, because we meet up with Anna and Pete at the Cowbridge Food Fair and Anna gives us a present of 9 bricks… That’s my kind of present! We do a bit of cake decorating (stone wall and a wooden fence for the orienteering cake) when we get home – we’ve got four cakes (including a wedding cake) to do by the end of November. Eek. Don’t people know we have a shed to build??
Achieved so far: We have a space where a base will go, and a space where a path will go! And we have a lot of bricks…
Hours worked: From 8.45 to 1.30 then from 2.30 – 4 plus the bricks on Saturday. And I think we have to count the ‘getting clean and dry stages’ too which bumps it up a bit.
G&Ts consumed: Several. Well, all that digging had to be celebrated…
Plan for the week: Scalpings to arrive, be put down and jumped on, then shuttering to go up, concrete next Saturday. Good grief – by this time next week we should have a BASE!
Pressies: 9 bricks from Anna. My kind of girl.
Purchases: We bought a man and a digger. Well, hired them really.
Brick count: 59 from last week, 14 from the field that Guy found, 1 from the house renovation (big deal), 58 Friday lunchtime, and 48 (we counted them as we unstacked the car) from the house where the neighbour oddly owned the bricks. Anna’s 9 were already counted… So that’s now 180 bricks!! And all for free!! The aim is to get to 200, which should be a doddle – even though our neighbour has decided that he needs all the bricks that he has. How many did we need? About 150. Yes, ok, I got carried away…
More about bricks: On last Friday’s ‘Have I Got News For You’, the odd publication’ they take headlines from at the end was … wait for it…. ‘Brick Collector Monthly. I kid you not! See, I’m not the only one…
Wildlife update: The badger is now visiting every night for his diet of overcooked fruit cake and peanuts. And he’s stopped digging up the garden. One night I saw him with his mate, which I presumed was his female partner, until I realised ‘she’ was as big as ‘he’, so maybe it’s another male. Excellent! Gay badgers in the garden!!
Fascinating fact: Our local parish hall is having a ‘halloween party’ with a live band next Saturday night. The band’s name? The Sheds.
*Butt = Welsh term of endearment, like ‘mate’. Very valleys!
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