A busy day!

It was all go here yesterday, one of those days when everyone turns up at once!  We had an appointment already booked with SSE to install a smart meter and as luck would have it, the engineer arrived early in the time-slot.  The job had originally been booked for Wednesday of last week, but Adrian got a text with about 40 minutes of that time slot left to say that it was being cancelled due to "operating difficulties" ~ whatever that means 😒  Anyhoo, the job was done yesterday so Adrian can now amuse himself by telling me how much electricity we are using at any given minute of the flippin day ~ hopefully the novelty will wear off soon 😉

No sooner had the SSE engineer got here, than Shaun arrived for our monthly window-cleaning!  And then George and Dylan came along to do a concreting job for us.  They have been really busy catching up with work postponed during the lockdown, but had some free time yesterday so came over to Stromness.  It was good to see the pair of them; they are such nice guys and it's always lovely to catch up.  At one point we had three work vans parked outside the house!  Oh, and we also had a Tesco delivery in the afternoon 😄  

You may recall from this post that this part of the garden had grown pretty wild whilst we were busy creating the kitchen garden lower down.  Adrian worked really hard clearing everything out and for a while we had a big blue tarp there, held in place with bags of the rubble that he had dug out from the raised beds in the back garden.  Dylan popped by on Sunday to take a look at what we needed done, and told us that we could most definitely lose said rubble as a base for the concrete which was a great relief.  Mind you, there will still be a load more of the bloody stuff to get rid of by the time we have finished dismantling the beds in the back garden.  Oh well, we'll just have to cross that bridge when we get to it!

Ta daa!  Our new patio area 😊  I know that a large area of concrete doesn't look terribly attractive, but we're having to work with what we have as the steps and paths in the front garden are all concrete.  In time the two new sections will hopefully weather down and blend more with what's already there.  I can almost hear your minds ticking away, thinking that the little lip of the wooden retaining wall is an accident waiting to happen, but fear not my friends as I have a cunning plan!  We already have a pair of tall, narrow wooden planters that we haven't actually got round to using yet, so the plan is to place these against that lip to create a barrier.  They won't cover the whole of the space but we also have an old galvanised water tank that came out of the bathroom roof space when the roof was re-tiled, which should fit between the two wooden planters to fill the gap and add that little bit of contrast.

It will be lovely to have a nice space to sit next summer and in the meantime I can have a good think about what to put in those planters 😊