Nightmare day

I’d hoped that by the end of today I’d have been able to say that I’d completed the shuttering for the concrete base of my new tool store. However, despite working nearly the whole day, practically to the point of exhaustion, I’m afraid that the job’s still not finished.

The main problem has been the amount of stone that I’m digging out of the ground every time I put a shovel into it or swing my pickaxe. Here’s a shot showing what I mean.

Apart from making it really hard work, it also makes it very difficult to bang the pegs that the shutter boards are mounted on into the ground. The last time that I was able to work outside before the rain came and made the ground too wet, I tried first banging the metal rod into the ground that I used to make holes through my stone walls. The idea was that by making holes in the ground for the pegs to go into it would make it much easier to bang them in down to the required level.

It partially worked so today I used an old pointed metal fence pole to make bigger holes that should have made it much easier. That worked pretty well in the beginning and before long I had the two short side boards in place as well as the long back board that I put in place last time. However, although the ground appears fairly dry on the surface, it’s still very damp further down and it seemed to get worse as the day progressed.

By the end of the afternoon, I was finding that after I’d banged the fence pole into the ground, withdrawn it and then tried to insert it back into the hole that it had just come out of, in fact I ended up having to bang it in as hard to get it back in as when I banged it in the first time. There were two reasons – when the pole was withdrawn, it was impossible to prevent earth and small stones falling into the hole and partially filling it and also because the ground is so damp, as soon as it is compressed, it becomes almost as hard as concrete. I’ve found that the loose earth that I’ve had to leave lying around has done that because of having to repeatedly walk on it and eventually I’m going to have to break it up again using my pickaxe.

Here’s how the job looked at the end of the day.

But don’t be fooled – there’s still quite a bit to do tomorrow, as the last shot shows. No matter how hard I whacked the board’s wooden pegs with my club hammer, it was impossible to get it down the last inch or so to the level of the other boards.

It has to, so I’ll have to find some sort of solution to the problem tomorrow. I’m not looking forward to it 😐