The Walk of Shame

That's what we were doing every time we had to go down the side of the garage, from the front garden to the back. The Walk of Shame, past dustbins, heaps of stones and bricks, old bits of guttering, tree stumps, pieces of metal from the old fruit cage and other bits of general unwanted detritus. 

Quite a sight for sore eyes.

Luckily, some of it was hidden from view by the fence and the garage.

But not all of it.

Can you believe we've dug all of these stones up from various places in the garden? And there are, no doubt, plenty more just waiting to be discovered in the areas of overgrowth/undergrowth that we have yet to tackle. The joy.

But yesterday, as a special Father's Day treat (?!) we decided to make a start on tidying this area up. First off, we moved all of the long pieces of wood (old fence posts) that had been stacked vertically in the far right corner against the fence. Hubby loaded them into the back of our old car and took them to the tip the next day.

This left a space like so (and, guess what, there were already some stones there waiting for us.)

Then it was time to load up the old wheelbarrow with stone after stone after stone and move them from the rather large pile(s) that had migrated across the garden to one neater pile in this corner. Whilst moving the stones we were also able to sort through them and pull out the nice(r) Victorian red bricks that can be used as path edging stones, and some of the other large blocks that can be used for possible future building projects. We are undecided as to the fate of the rest of the stones - either they'll go to the tip or we'll keep them as hardcore for when we get round to extending the patio. We learnt the hard way about hardcore: when the house was being demolished/renovated/extended all of the old bricks, rubble, etc were taken away by our builder. At the end of the build we decided we needed a patio; the builder then told us we needed hardcore for the foundations and we had to buy back tons of rubble; the lesson is this - if you think you might want a patio, make that decision earlier in the build so you don't end up having to buy back stones that you'd gotten rid of already. Gah.

Here they are, all "neatly" stacked in the corner, alongside spare roof tiles and with the spare patio slabs in the crate next to them.

Hooray, no more stones slowly making their way down the garden.

It's a long way off being pretty, but it's a long way better than it was.

Chances are it won't stay quite this neat for long as there are more stones that need to be added to the pile, plus the bins have to be put back in this area, but it's a start...