One pink closet later

Well, it has been a long time since I have updated the blog! I know many of you have been eagerly awaiting more news on the garden progress, and I can only apologise, but hope that todays input will satisfy your curiosity.

In June, I took 3 days off work and got stuck in, or at least that was the plan. The weather was good for a change, the trench for the footings for the raised area were dug, we had made numerous trips to B+Q for ballast, sharp sand and cement and we tried to order a cement mixer for that day, but there were none available!

OK, plan two - not to waste good DIY time, we set to work on finishing the closet which had been unusable since Christmas when we had to stop work on the bedroom for the festivities. So three days of plastering, fitting architrade round the new doorway, wallpapering, painting etc - our new closet was ready to be put to use again! As you can see it has a bit of a girly pink theme!








Monday morning, the cement mixer arrived, but unfortunately it is a rather unweilding heavy peice of machinery - something I did not forsee. Consequently, I could not lift the thing onto its legs on my own, so I had to wait for Rachel to come home after work - it is definately a two woman job! We started the process of filling up our trenches with concrete (5 part 20mm ballast to1 part portland cement) mixed with water and a bit of washin up liquid.

Mmmm those trenches swallowed up alot of concrete, so off we were back to B+Q filling up the back of the Ford Ka with as much ballast and cement the poor thing could manage - in all I think we used about 20 bags of ballast!



So after poring what probably was a few tonnes of concrete back into the garden, which I have to say does not feel good, especially since it cost so much (£60 - who would have thought?) and becasue of the worry about whether the raised area will look good or if we will hate and want to rip it out - in which case the only option is to move house!

We were left with this:

Looks great, does it not? Throughout all this hard work, I could not help questionsing myself, why did I want a raised area in the first place? It seemed like such alot of effort (one which I never appreciated at the start - I thought it would be a case of throwing up a few bricks which might take a day or two at most!), for something that once completed could end up looking like a 1980's garden monstrosity! Well, we'll see..........