The Party & The Cleanup

The big birthday party was a bit of a success. I spent the Friday afternoon and evening cooking up some treats and preparing the meat, so on the day we started with profiteroles, then had lunch of fennel pork belly and roast vegetables, following that with a birthday cake (fudge chocolate with vienna filling and icing and a bit of blackberry jam) and a piece of lemon meringue pie (sadly the lemon bit was runny, but it was still edible). We all enjoyed the time together, the weather was nice enough, not the sunny days of the week before, it was overcast and a bit chilly, but still nice all the same. All in all a top event!

After the main festivities were completed we sat around the campfire into the early evening, roasting marshmallows with the kids until their bedtime, then it was quiet time with the brother, listening to some old hits on the local radio station, sampling some red wine, singing to the better tunes. Campfire time was cut short when "I can't stand the rain" began to play, and, inevitably, it began to rain.

Sunday dawned cloudy, and after a suitable period of morning recuperation I packed up copious amounts of hot water for coffee and set off to the new land, hoping to get through most of the preparatory work needed in getting the shed site ready to go.

Shed site before. It is going to sit across the picture, and the bins further
back will impinge upon it's footprint. The fence to be removed runs from the
second post on the right across the picture to the left.

Started out with measuring up the location for the shed according to the submitted plans. I'd made a couple of last minute on-paper changes to the location to accommodate some other tentative future plans, so I needed to know where the shed was really going to go. Once this was sorted out it was on to removing the small fence that formed the back boundary of the shed yard. As the first picture shows, there's also a lot of materials stored in the region of the shed site. Once the fence was down all of these needed to be moved, which was the largest part of the job. There must have been a couple of ton of steel in there at least.

Shed site after. The fence is gone and all the resources are moved into a neat stash
out of the way. You can just make out, if your eyes are sharp, some white posts,
far left cutting across the shadow, in front of the right-most bin, and then a
couple more cunningly hidden on the mid-right.

Amazingly I made it through it all, and had time to chop a small load of wood before dark. Then it was off for home again. The next major action on the shed project should be getting the earthworks done, which will most likely involve a bit of (internal) road building as well.

Below is a picture, for no particular reason at all, of the wonderful old sawmill we were gifted with. It's going to need a bit of work before it runs again though... Nice old piece of machinery all the same.