Getting the site ready

After a long wait, there was lots to do to get the site ready for demolition. We started back in September 2018 with hiring a mini-digger for a weekend to rip up a load of the remains of structures we'd found under years of vegetation - huge thick low walls made of flint and cement, some sort of enclosures (?), wooden surrounds of raised beds now very much sunken.

Hiring a mini-digger is literally the best way to spend a weekend, ever.   Even if you don't have anything you need to do with one. The joy of ripping things up is beyond belief if you've never tried it.

In autumn 2018 we got the services cut off. We now have our electricity supply terminated at the pole behind, and plenty of warnings about being careful when trimming the hedge. 

The old greenhouse (with several panes missing) up the top of the garden was in just the spot we fancied a sitting area, and besides I couldn't see myself walking up the garden to use it given how rubbish I am at growing things... So we advertised this locally and had a couple from Twyford come and dismantle it to take it to a new home. 




By January 2019 we had to dig a load of trial pits for the purposes of checking the soil. Another excuse to hire a mini-digger (hooray!), and dig some very deep pits. We are most definitely on chalk and flint. And a mini-digger can dig down to 2.5m, which is a hole you don't want to fall down. We covered ours up with a few old doors from the house.

What was then needed was somewhere to store stuff, as we'd left a lot of our tools and gardening bits inside the old house. It would've been near impossible to get a container craned on site so we found a flat-pack container instead which we bought 2nd hand on eBay, from an Italian paint shop in north London - we hired a Luton van and drove up there to get it with my Dad. Still no idea how the three of us managed to do it as it was a 4-person job, but somehow we got it into the van and out the other end. Took a few days to recover and you should've seen the bruises.

The following weekend, remember that beautiful but really cold weekend when it had snowed the night before, Andy and I had to erect the damn thing. Seeing as we still didn't have that recommended 4-person team, we - wait for it - hired a mini-digger (wooo!) which was used in various ingenious ways to get the 150kg base up the garden into place. Many fraught hours of shouting and swearing at each other followed, but eventually it was in place and bolted together, albeit without a roof. My hands thawed out a few days later. 

We got a cheapo tarpaulin sheet the following day to cover it over and hoisted it up to try to keep off the worst of the rain - just in time as there were high winds and torrential rain the following night.

On the third weekend in a row we had help from a knight in shining armour in the form of our previous neighbour David, who popped down bringing his son Russell, and it took about ninety seconds to lift the roof up and in place. PHEW. Thanks guys! We could finally "relax", and spent the rest of that weekend filling it up with junk, just in time for demolition to start.

With a few security fence panels in place we were ready to go!