The patio takes shape

Another week of stop/start progress, hindered yet again by the weather. After the retaining wall was built the builder was able to fill the void with hardcore and flatten it with a "wacker" to provide a solid base for the flagstones. The past few days have seen most of the very large patio area finished with red sandstone flagstones.

In addition, the builder has been laying stones from the back door around the side of the house. This required some careful work with levels to ensure that there was a suitable slope for rainwater run-off. The old path around the west side of the cottage was very good at collecting pools of water but hopefully we've fixed that now.

The patio area is starting to look rather good!

Starting on the patio

It's been a while coming, what with the dreadful weather and tradesman availability but at last we got started on the patio today. First we needed to level the area down to hard sub soil. This produced a considerable amount of top soil which we will use to build up and grade the low lying land notably in the south east corner It's certainly a large area!

We had about seven tons of hardcore delivered by tractor and for now this has been barrowed through and heaped up in the patio area, awaiting completion of drainage and a small retaining wall, both of which we hope to finish this week.

Whilst we had the digger, we took the opportunity to move all the top soil that was saved from digging out the extension area. This soil will also help to bank up the low land which will be an interesting landscaping challenge for my gardener!

Finally we dug out the discharge pipe from the septic tank. This has been working poorly for some time and today we discovered the reason! Over the 80+ years since the house was built tree roots have cracked the old fashioned porcelain pipes, allowing mud and debris to enter. We're planning to leave it overnight to dry out with a view to finding a solution tomorrow.

All in all we made a lot of mess (and a lot of progress) today!