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.