Monday 29th March (Week 5)

 Another hot sunny day and Joe and I got on with it. Plan to get the section at the bottom all dug out. 

The last part of the bottom section mean that we had to move all the bricks and rubble that had been stacked where the spade is in the picture (Left). The bricks were all moved under the ramp and tided up and a lot of the pebbles and small pieces of rubble which will form the base on which the gabions will be placed on are now being stored in bins and container on the top section.

The earth pile at this stage is quite small, but just about to grow in size and I was aware of this. So I then got some old scaffold boards from the garage and placed them along the edge of where we're going to be digging to. The grassed area already slopes, so we spent some time spreading the clay over the grass in order to try and rectify the slope, but we've been warned that as the earth settles in the rain over time it will shrink down and compress, so we probably need to level it up to the top of the scaffold boards (See picture) 

By the time we finished up at 6pm we'd been joined by my other son Ben and so the speed in which the work was getting done rapidly increased...

Here you can see the bricks now stacked under the ramp. The big yellow bag is slowly filling up with top soil..

In this shot you can see how big the pile is. Down the road from me another bloke is having his garden landscaped and I asked the builders about Muck away companies and what they do in terms of how they price up the job and he asked me...

"How much have you got"?

"What - in terms of cubic metres"?

"No... tonnes". Me thinks how the hell would I know? But from the rest of the conversation it sounded like this here might already cost me over £200 to be taken away which isn't good. So I'm going to call them tomorrow, but I'll be scuppered if they ask how much I've got in terms of weight. So finger crossed it's not going to be anywhere near that price!

I also asked about reaching over the bush and wall and he seemed to think that it wasn't a problem at all.