Day 11 - Tuesday PM

So it rained all f'king day and now at 19:00 the sun comes out ! bloody marvellous, thanks JC.

Anyway, I got the cut sleepers laid out. Once fixed in place they should look something like this:

You can see why I need a few more sleepers, and also the mud bath I have to work in. I also got about half of the pilot holes drilled for the decking frame. I'm now running about half a day behind and really need to make this up tomorrow.

Day 11 - Tuesday AM

Right then Jesus, time for you and I to have a heart to heart my cloth wearing friend..

I have a modest number of days annual leave allocated by my masters each year and I try to use them wisely, normally a weeks family holiday and then the required days for Christmas, after that I tend to use them to achieve various home improvement projects to better the life of my family, and the value of our property (which is negative by the way, thanks Gordon you twat !).

So I'm into the second week of annual leave to turn our garden from some 'Ground Farce' botch up into a space that is both pleasant, useful and safe for my son. And what do you do, strike at me at every turn, it's baking hot for the weeks I spend travelling 5 hours a day to the hell hole that is London, sweating it out on the tube of death and then as soon as I'm on leave.. you make it piss it down with rain all day today ! the garden now looks like a Glastonbury mud bath and every job is twice as hard to get done.

You may as well send round the four horsemen to help with the measuring up, ffs

Some say you were misunderstood, and some that history had to play out this way for a higher purpose. I tell you what though,  if I'd been there on 1st April 33 I'd have used more than 3 nails..

**RANT OVER** Until we clash swords again JC.

Observe the mud bath..

So all I've really achieved today is to move the decking boards inside (again), measure up for the width of the sleepers that form the back wall and cut them to length. Ideally I'd like to get them in today, and then drill the pilot holes for the decking frame although after measuring up it looks like there will be a fair bit of work to get the rear sleeper wall level. This is important as it will provide the guide to laying the side sleepers.

I'm also aware that after laying out the frame yesterday I may need to lower the ground level a little to get the correct depth, and I'm a little strapped for where to put the spoil as I really do not want to hire yet another skip.

Anyway, back into the breech..

Day 10 - Monday

Well then, here it is day 10, unfortunately it did not get off to the best start..

I went to a local DIY store to grab a couple of extra sleepers, despite having previously purchased 8 sleepers from the same store just 4 short weeks ago they no longer stock 'that' model of sleeper in store anymore, only one that is smaller shorter and is really more a bit of wood than a sleeper, ffs.

It took about 5 minutes to extract this information from the worlds most unhelpful and dense 'customer services operative' who seemed barely aware of what line of business his employer was in.. and for once the employee wasn't some young disaffected cool kid whose only care is texting on his mobile, his face book status and how best to score with the hot chick on Friday night round the back of the local church... No, the 'customer services operative' in question was some senile silver haired mutha fooker, part of the 'Free jobs at DIY stores for all retired idiots, no interview required' programme which is so popular these days.

Anyway with an hour of my life wasted I headed home to get stuck in. The first job was to finish shaping the right hand side to the required depth and get it vertical.

With that done I moved the decking boards inside to give me room to layout the outside edge of the frame with a sleeper on each side and measure up.

The decking frame will be 261 cm wide and 360 cm deep, this will make it 18 decking boards wide with a 5mm gap between each board for expansion.

With the measurements in hand I marked up and cut all 9 of the frame cross beams to length and laid them out in a rough fit.

The main issue with screwing the frame together will be the clearance or lack of on each side, this will make it very difficult to get in with the electric screwdriver and impossible for the drill so I will need to mark and pre-drill the pilot holes for the screws. I'll make that the first job for tomorrow.

It's back on like Donkey kong..

Right, I've booked another weeks annual leave which begins tomorrow (9th August 2010) and I'm ready for decking action..

This is the last block of time I will spend working on the garden decking project so it has to be completley finished by Sunday 15th August.. no excuses, no nothing it must be done by then, for my sanity if nothing else.

Everything is prepared, the wood for the decking frame was delivered last week and I've loaded up with frame and decking screws from a local DIY store this weekend. I did think about starting this weekend but in the end something much more fun came up...

As I'm sure many people do we regularly visit ikea for this and that, most trips normally result in my son wanting to purchase just about everything child related in the store and being a little upset when we don't.

One of his favourite things is the Ikea childs play kitchen:

An impressive looking bit of kit however, what you are looking at is actually two items with a total cost of £96.00 !

Not wanting to deny our son or to outlay almost £100 we decided to build our own play kitchen by buying various bits'n'pieces and then slapping them together.

So with all the pieces to hand and my son and partner away for the weekend I spent Saturday afternoon and Sunday morning constructing this !!!

I am really very happy with the result and I had so much fun building it ! and the best is yet to come when I see the look on my sons face when he sees it :)

With that diversion aside here's looking forward to day 10 of the garden resurrection project..

Day 9 - Sunday

Right, day 9 the final day of digging hell. The aim today was to finish excavating the nemesis. Save for 5 cm I made it, halle-fucking-lujah !

The right side is all but complete and the skip is full to overflowing, I still can't believe how much has come out of such a small area.

So close of play today is:

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And skip number two is a little full...

So what's next ?, well unfortunately back to work for a bit until I can arrange another weeks annual leave. Then the fun really starts, installation of the sleepers building the frame and laying the deck boards. I have a sneaking feeling that I may need to level off the ground area a little so no doubt another skip will be needed.

And the last laugh... is on Google, whose street view and Google earth images of my house are ridiculously out of date ! up yours you mocha drinking, wireless data stealing, pointless OS creating, Apple wanna be  pricks..

Just to note that writing this post on Blogger (Owned by Google) using Chrome, Google is identified as an incorrect spelling with Goggle and Googly as the first two suggestions - muppets, ffs.

Day 8 - Saturday (Again)

Bloody hell, eight days already.. I hardly noticed ;) This whole garden thing is starting to feel a bit too much like a job...


Anyway massive progress with the work today, the left side has been smoothed making the cut in vertical (just about, took hours), also I rolled out the sleepers to both check the depth is correct and to try to get an idea of what the end result might be, unfortunately I hadn't got it quite right and needed to take another half a foot out at the back, an hour later and I was in business.

I'm thinking I may need to add further sleepers down the sides as one length doesn't quite look right and adding another would give the illusion of a longer garden.

With the left side finished for now and the back at the right depth and vertical I needed to move the decking boards over to allow me to attack the right side, as I was moving them anyway I took the opportunity to lay out a few boards to check depth and get a sneak peek.

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Obviously the height and spacing isn't quite correct, but you get the idea. With all the decking moved over to the left I'm now set up to lay into the right side of the nemesis tomorrow, just two days until I have to return to work so I'd better make it count.

 A few pics of how things stand at close of play on day eight.

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Just for a change a view from the back of the garden.

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Sitting at the back to take these pictures I realised how deep the bed will be on the right side, with the depth we will be able to plant multiple layers making the back of the garden a real focal point and giving a great view from the lounge or conservatory. Luckily I'm not be responsible for the planting as an expert it on hand...

Finally, it feels like the longest fraking eight days of my life ever however a quick look at how things were back then makes me feel a little better.

Day 7 - Friday

Dear God everything hurts so bad ! The endless pick, shovel and chugg work is really relentless on the muscles. The first round is the worst each day as all the pain comes flooding back as soon as I pick up the pick.

Fantastic progress today though, I faced off against the nemesis this morning and I have finally reached the back dig line, hurrah !

I tested the depth by laying out a few decking boards, it is difficult to see but I can almost imagine the finished result.

With the back line reached I cracked into digging out the left side. When finished the back and each side will be lined by sleepers with the deck sitting snug between and some heavy planting in the back bed to obscure the wall. The left side is now all but finished with just smoothing to get it vertical remaining.

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Until very recently our neighbour had a huge hedge on the boundary of her garden right behind our fence, the hedge has now been removed and some god awful pebble gravel hell makeover inflicted on her garden by a bunch of cowboys who must have been on Watchdog or Rouge Traders at least once.. anyway it's all very good having your hedge chopped down to the stumps but that doesn't take care of the bastard roots which have spent years infiltrating your neighbours garden. Excavating the left side I seem to come across a root every other swing of the pick.

So far my collection looks like this, and that's just this afternoon:

The rule of aeration is one that will catch  you off guard if you every go Dizzie Rascal (bonkers) insane and decide it's a good idea to dig out your back garden, essentially the rule states that for each quantity of tightly compacted earth you remove the process of excavation aerates it and results in it taking up 1.5 x the space of the original compacted size, I can best demonstrate this with a picture of skip number two..

So it's looking like this 'little project' will take 2 weeks of annual leave, 3 skips and far too much money for my liking to complete, oh well.

Roll on day 8 - awesome.