More like it!

I was really disappointed with what I managed to achieve yesterday, especially given how long I’d worked and how much effort I’d had to put in. But today was better, much, much better!

I’d decided that it would be a waste of time to just keep trying to bang the shutter board pegs into the ground and that it would be better to hit them with the big guns straight away, by pickaxing down to the peg depth at each peg position first. And lucky that I did, because when I did so for the end peg that wouldn’t go down, I found the reason why. There were lots of small stones at exactly the depth at which the peg had stopped and even with banging the metal fence pole into the ground first, all that was happening was that the tip of the board peg would then hit another one of them on the next attempt.

The pickaxe method worked a treat and after carefully clearing away any other potential obstructions that might have prevented it from sitting down, I had the board in place within a few minutes. But not without a fair bit more physical effort, mind.

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I then backfilled the outer faces of all four boards sufficient to provide them with enough support against the weight of the concrete that they’d eventually contain and then it was time to level the area off within the boards and fill it with hardcore. Now the one thing we’re not short of in the Dordogne, as people will now realise, is hardcore. First in was all the stone that I’d dug out while preparing the base and then a load of stone under the nearby tree that I’d first come across with my new mower when I first began mowing my grass. But that still left a shortfall.

Now it just so happens that my old neighbour, Benjamin, had built up quite a nice little heap of clean stone from digging and tending his vegetable patch, which I knew he’d left in his garden under the trees next to my drive-in. As the new tenant will shortly be arriving, I thought that this would be a good time to remove it, and here are some shots that I took in the late afternoon after I’d put the whole heap into the base.

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Brilliant! I don’t think that my new next-door neighbour would mind if she knew – in fact I’m sure that she’d be delighted to see the back of it. So it’s a win-win situation, which is an excellent way to end the weekend 😉