Get the idea?

Not much to see today but what I did do tired me out. I took the opportunity to hitch my large trailer to the car and get rid of all of the packaging material that’s been taking over the living room. All the new appliances have come packed in masses of expanded polystyrene and plastic and I carted it all off to the ‘décheterie’ in Rouffignac and disposed of it.

While the trailer was attached I had an idea. As I’ve mentioned previously, the stone that’s been laid around the house is more for effect than anything else as it’s not been tamped down enough to take any weight at all. Even walking on it leaves footmarks so there’s no chance that my outdoor furniture that I brought with me from my old house could be placed on it, let alone used.

However, I’d like to use the area at the rear to take a break on while I’m working in the house and it occurred to me that if I laid stone slabs out there they might disperse the weight enough to make the area usable. To get there you’d need to use the pathway on the south side of the house which also consists of soft stone so in order to avoid destroying that by walking up and back on it, stone slabs would have to be laid on that first.

So that’s what I got started on today, by taking my trailer over to Brico Depot and loading it up with the stone slabs that I want. To do all around the house I’ll need several hundred but initially I’ve calculated that for the side pathway and the terrace area at the back around 200 will do. I loaded my trailer up with the first 70 and my guess was that it was already then overloaded, but I got them all home and laid as the side pathway is fairly level and here’s how it looked afterwards.

Do you get the idea? I think that it’ll be a quick and effective way of getting a good looking result and it needs to be done before there’s too much foot traffic on the surfaces involved that will affect their levelness. And it’ll be nice to be able to sit outside and enjoy a cool beer under my large parasol. That’s if the mice haven’t got to it first 😕