Thursday/Friday, July 23rd/24th 2020 – The Great House Extension Project (Days 4 & 5)

On Thursday nothing much happened, but on Friday the offending tree went. If I’d left it to Jim (the architect) the gods only know how long we’d have had to wait. I didn’t, because the best man for the job is usually a woman, and in this case I was that woman. The tree surgeon I’d spoken to last on Wednesday was as good as his word and turned up at 09:00 armed with a Timber Wolf shredder which looks like a fun machine. He and his assistant got straight to work and by 10:15 the tree and the surrounding hedges were gone. I won’t say there’s no sign they were ever there (because they have just been cut off at ground level) but they are sufficiently gone that we can now proceed. It’s confused the hell out of the local pigeon population (never the smartest of birds) as they can’t understand where their perch has gone.

Mal, the builder, called me in the afternoon and said that if his sub-contractor who owns the digger was available, we’d be restarting next Monday. He also said he’d had a good long chat with Rob, the Structural Engineer, who was drawing up suggested ways of dealing with the left behind stump and roots without having to find someone to grind the stump out, something which cannot be achieved inside the next two weeks.
Meanwhile I hauled a load of suitcases (14 I think) full of Lynne’s clothes over to a self-storage unit in the nearest town. This has had to be done because our built in wardrobe is not likely to survive the build when we hit the “break through what used to be the outer wall” stage of the buid. I still have to sort my stuff, but we’re at least halfway through the necessary sorting of all the things that need to be dealt with in wardrobe terms. There’s still the loft, which I don’t even want to think about!

So while not much happened on the building front, I managed to have a busy day, sorting out the storage unit, making Giorgio Locatelli’s ragu Bolognese to use up a bottle of wine that proved undrinkable (it was fizzing when I took the slightly suspect looking cork out – red wine shouldn’t do that), sous vide cooked a couple of steaks ready for Sunday night, ran round like a lunatic dealing with stuff in the garden, and cooked a really good dinner, which was preceded by making cocktails (Aperol spritzes if you want to know). I’d rather be getting on with the extension build but needs must…