Week 17: Phase 3: The steps of woe. 26/6/21

 Saturday - What no cricket? Ben got a message from test and trace saying that he'd been in the vicinity of someone who had Covid, so he had to isolate and the same for me until he got the results from his test through, so I had to contact the club and say I wouldn't be playing. So instead it was a day of gardening...

The plan going forwards was a step a day from now on, but I realised quickly I couldn't actually put in any further steps in because I need to put in the sleepers at the same time, so the plan for today was to do as much prep as possible.

The image above shows more of the sleepers put in place temporarily, giving an impression of how it'll look as the works done.

This image above illustrates an issue I need to address. It looks like the existing substrate under the paving slabs is substantial enough to go with before placing the sandstone tiles? Which means my order of 3 x bags of MOT may be well over the top, so on Monday I'm going to try and swap the order over for a bag of sand instead. Otherwise I reckon I'll have a whole bag of MOT stuck in the garden.

The image below shows one of the objectives - digging out the dirt and making it level with the step in front. This is now ready for the next load of paving slabs to go in to form the foundations.

Here you can see I've started to dig deeper holes to set the next set of sleepers in...

Dust everywhere from cutting up a batch of slabs to be used for foundations. In the meantime they're used as stepping stones on the mud.

Below the first experimental cutting of the sandstone. I've got a load of these massive slabs that are extra as these are what's going to be used on the steps....

Looking around and trying to keep up with the logistics of this, I still reckon there's space on the top half of the garden for more earth to be dumped as part of the leveling up. There's still a lot of earth that needs to come out of the bottom prior to putting the MOT down. It's amazing how space soon gets taken up with stuff and all this space here needs to be cleared soon for the MOT and sand delivery on Wednesday. 

The Sandstone slab above was cut to the size of the bottom step and I played around with seeing how it might be used and it looks at the moment that it just sits on top of the gabions and that may be enough. I'm going to leave it there as we work and see if it breaks over the next month or so.