Roads to Joy

Work has commenced here in our Holmview garden, in a fair few places. The gate that was a barrier has been taken down, as I’ve mentioned in an earlier entry here on my pursuit of joys. The carving out of a place for our new greenhouse is now ongoing (to the left of the decorative pots, in fact, in a little cutaway above which the mossy lawn rises to the sunset), though the greenhouse itself may have to wait for another year, another dollar as it were. 

A concrete base for a small shed to accommodate a few garden implements, tucked away out of sight at the front, will help reduce the clutter in the larger storage shed at the side of the house. Each of these projects takes their own time.

Yesterday, for example, although some patio paving slabs, sharp sand and aggregate were delivered, by Hi-Ab off the big lorry into position, work was impossible in the driving rain. The remarkable sunset, as the clouds parted at the end of the day, was the best part of those ten hours of dreich.

Today promises to be mostly sunshine. A great time to be finishing the cement slabs, setting them in place, polishing off the front shed’s concrete base, and getting ready to build the shed and its tiny companion (with offcuts) for the generator. We actually had a power outage two evenings ago, lasting from 9:40pm until 2:20 am, but it was rather easier to retreat with candles to bed, at that point, than to try to restore power of our own. I’ll be happier when the generator is connected to our own circuits by an independent switch, so that I can power it up whenever it’s needed, in future.

When inclement weather returns, as it surely will over this season, we’ll hope that another builder will arrive with his team to take down an internal supporting wall, install a large Reinforced Steel Joist, and finish this internal job with aplomb. So we’re commencing our year of renovations, it seems, at last.

It was important to settle into the old house, however, over the past year, to think and consider how we might accomplish this and that project. With those months of thought under our belts, we can hope to proceed with confidence.

A good set of projects, it must be said, in our own sunset years, but nonetheless exciting and energising for all of that. We can be sure, as well, that we’ll find the joy in the starting, in the middle of the work as the things that had lived only in our imagination take physical shape, and finally in the end when each project comes to its natural conclusion.