A Step up in the Garden

Just for a change from walls, I have recently (almost) made a set of steps in the garden.  The need for these steps came from the desire to ensure that the house was never troubled again by the dampness caused by rising ground.  The photo (left) shows the garden as it was, with high ground and the old extension; the new steps are where the scruffy elder was growing, and go down about a foot below the old ground level. We took away the raised earth from beside the house last September (see this entry), and made a sort of lane beside the house with a two to three foot high earth bank.  A retaining wall is being built to keep the earth bank away from the house, and so the steps are needed to reach the higher plateau of what will be a lawn (in due course...).

These steps (right) have been made to last, using Thermalite blocks on a concrete foundation, and concrete slabs as the steps and risers.  The annoying thing here was that I tried to make 6.5 inch steps and the first one came out at 7.5 inches; I tried to correct this on the upper two steps and they still came out at 7.5 inches! Hence the top step, when done, might either have a smaller riser, or else I will be moving soil around to get a decent level at the top.  The blocks are easily cut using a sacrificial saw - I used one left by my builder last October.  However, I had another issue with cutting the concrete paving slabs.  They are REALLY tough, and I now reckon my design is over-engineered as I have taken the trouble to make sure that the slabs are properly supported, but now I don't think that I needed to bother as they are so strong. I've only tried a few cuts and found that my new grinding disc is already completely knackered.  So now my technique is to simply score them with the grinder on both sides, and then split them using a lump hammer and my 3 inch bolster - result!

The sides of the steps (and the rest of the retaining wall) will be faced with small bits of limestone to mimic a dry stone wall, except that the back of the stones will actually be set in mortar - probably NHL3.5.  I then hope to grow plants to trail down the wall from the top, some campion at the bottom and, perhaps, something actually growing in the wall itself to give that effect of a lovely Devon lane.  It's just a personal memory of childhood holidays there...

Front Lawn and Driveway

After all that's been done on this house in less than two years, you wouldn't think that I could have a problem over something as simple as cutting the grass.  The problem is storage - there is nowhere to keep a lawnmower, so until there is I don't want to buy one.  I used to have a sickle (inherited with the property) which kept things under control last year but somewhere this has been lost; I think I hid it so that my grandson could not hurt himself (or us!) with it, and now I cannot find it.  This was useful at keeping the weeds down, but is a bit labour intensive really.  Slowly this year the grass has grown to represent a moderate hay crop in some places; since the lawn I seeded in March has grown wonderfully, I'm puzzled as to why the old lawn has grown so slowly. 

Anyway, the solution was quite simple in the end - I borrowed my son's mower! This seems a small payment for the babysitting that I do (even though I do enjoy looking after my grandson).  His lawn is less than half the size of mine, so the mower had a good workout.

Of course, having done that task and made it look very nice indeed, only a day later Colin, my friendly groundworker, came and drove his digger over it.  Reason? At last my neighbour is having his driveway done, so very soon he will be able to enter the front garden through his own gateway and park on his own drive for the first time. On the right is a shot of the work in progress, with the mown lawn being abused and the first pile of three being prepared for the grab lorry.

The photo below shows the almost finished task, which has a lot more driveway than mine.  The old gap in the wall is on the left; I had my eye on the stone from the new gap but sadly his part of the front wall had been rebuilt at some time in the recent past using C*M*NT mortar, so it took a pneumatic drill to prise it all apart.  [I'm sorry that I just cannot bring myself to spell the C-word with regard to its use on period property.]  The result is that many of the stones are broken and unusable.  In comparison, my bit of wall came apart very easily last year - see this previous entry.  I'm not sure that it had any mortar at all apart from some recent c*m*nt pointing which was not very deep (or useful, of course).

There was a small problem yesterday when one of Colin's workers pierced the neighbour's water supply with the pneumatic drill - I think Colin was quite embarrassed by that! Fortunately it was on the right side of the meter only 18" away, and a groundworker has all the necessary bits and knowledge to fix that very quickly; no harm done.