Slaving in the garden on and off over the last few days has been productive. A retaining wall to the front door that was collapsing is now in good shape again and the muddy path down the side of the house has been lined with crushed concrete.
Also, a garden bed lined with bricks has been replaced with redgum sleepers and MP got more veggie garden. Unfortunatley, someone thinks it’s a great place to sleep.
We slaved all day and had just finished and put the kettle on when Muppet’s Mum drops in for a cuppa and a look-see. An hour earlier and she would have been swinging a sledge hammer. A good sense of timing, eh!
Well done, all your hard work has sure paid off, it’s looking great!
I forgot to say NICE GARDEN! I see eggplant and green beans, what the plants that are staked, and the ones have white collars? I also noticed the purple African daisies in the back, I used to have those in my flower garden, but they scatter seed that seems to germinate without fail, so I stopped planting them because I’d have to pull all the new seedlings out of our gravel.
MP is the gardener and I hope I have this right. The staked ones are climbing beans and the ones with white collars are lettuce and silverbeet. Those collars are pieces of drainage pipe to stop the cat sleeping on them. The purple daisies don’t seem to be a problem here.
The walkway picture raised all manner of questions in my mind, like what kind of foundation is under your house and why isn’t that corner of the house unstable if all that holds it up is a ledge of soil, or is there a concrete and/or block retaining wall or foundation under that corner of the house? I keep thinking if there was a retaining wall why wasn’t it continued along the walkway? Am I explaining myself clearly? I guess what I’m wondering is how does that corner of the house stay up? Nice job on the walkway, in Arizona we would have used a base of riprap and clay/sand/concrete mixture to keep the walkway bricks stable since we have so much clay in our soil.
The house is on concrete stumps buried in concrete foundations and that’s what supports the corner of the house and not the soil. That soil isn’t supporting anything and is independent of the house. It’s just fill to create a walkway to the door because the house is on a hill. If you took the wall and path away, you’d have the house bricks going down to the foundations. There was supposed to be a galvanised C bracket at the house but we couldn’t put it in because the concrete foundations were in the way so hence the treated pine post instead. I’m no great handyman but it all looks a lot better than what was there before.
I bet 4×6′s
3×8′s
I’m a bit wee worried about the retaining wall. Four be Two’s on edge for lateral strength??????
Scary if someone tries to bring the fridge through that door…
I’ll pray for your retaining wall…
We don’t do imperials anymore. The timber is 75x200x2400 or 3×8 in your inches. We brought a new fridge through that door a few weeks back when the wall was collapsing and at a 45 degree angle and nothing moved. When we pulled out the old sleepers which were the same size and had been there for 30 years, nothing came away and the soil was packed solid and was shored up behind the sleepers. The posts are in a long way and packed with cement (unlike the old ones). Anyway, the only people who use that door are sales people trying to flog religion or a mobile phone, and if it collapses, tough titties.
You guys have to build for 3 metres of snow and earthquakes. Probably volcano’s too! Have faith my man!
I’m looking forward to getting outside in the back yard to do some similar yard work in the spring, but all is frozen solid right now. (good excuse eh?) But the strange thing is we only have a tiny smattering of snow compared to the huge snowstorms that have been hitting the usa south of us. But I’m not complaining!
BTW did you see the opening ceremonies of the Vancouver Olympics? The genius who put it all together is an Australian, David Atkins, what a great job he did. A wonderful portrait of Canada. But we were all gasping when the flame cauldron didn’t come up out of the floor as it should. However, he made the best of it and everything went smoothgly in spite of the mechanical glitch. Brilliant!
I couldn’t imagine living where everything freezes in winter. If it gets to 1c here, it makes headline news. Goodness knows how we’d go handling snowy roads and ice like you guys do.
I’m sorry to say the winter Olympics aren’t a big thing here. We get two hours of highlights from 9:30pm but it doesn’t get over the top coverage like the summer games. We have quite a few competitors in various events but I hope you guys do well and don’t let those Yanks bully you out of those gold medals.
You do realise that I dropped by earlier, saw all the hard work and drove around the block a couple of times until I saw you put the kettle on?
Of course! We saw the car driving by a few times.
Well done! I keep telling myself that I’ll get outside when it warms up a bit. . . .
The last time I saw a photo at your place you were well and truly under snow.
What a great job,wouldn’t mind some of the veggies.
I’m looking forward to them too. Nothing beats the flavour of home grown stuff.
Nice looking job there. Similar to some walls I put in here but using 6×6 logs; have to take into account the snow load.
Judging by those photos of Nain in winter, it would be some load to take into account!