After a few days off for recuperation and weather, we needed to get an injection of progress this weekend. After going out yesterday to retrieve all the fiddly bits for adding the SMB brackets to the short wall logs, as soon as we got the main pile uncovered, it started to rain, so Dave brought those bits inside to do and we covered up again. Sunday was supposed to be sunny...

Back to work for me yesterday, so no progress as I ploughed through backed up emails. Dave needed a day for his back to recover from the Herculean effort on Sunday. We had a good look at the window and door section in the manual on Monday evening and Dave felt ready to continue solo on Tuesday...

Nice sunny day today, so no excuse not to get the shingle down. A quick reccie and trample of the grids from last night, then we could put it off no longer. It was the trusty wheelbarrow's time to shine...

Given the weather on Friday, and the fact that my right knee has decided it really doesn't want to work at the moment, we took a "planning day". However, having organized wheelbarrow assistance for Sunday, we at least needed to get the RapidGrid base tiles down today.

Woke up to check the delivery details on my phone, to find an initial eta of around 9.15 am... I kept checking, with the estimated arrival time pushing out while the van was taking a scenic tour of South Buckinghamshire. With the estimated time of arrival of 10.47, I was a bit surprised to see the van as showing on the A34. While refreshing the page, Dave called out "there's a big van outside..."

Weather is due to change today, so we're taking it easy ahead of the delivery onslaught tomorrow. All the paperwork has been emailed this morning and delivery can be any time between 8 am and 6 pm.

Digging day today.
I took the first stint and got to the point filling the raised bed that I needed to put the top section on. Having seen how well the cast-off turf path was doing (we used the leftover tortoise turf to fill the gap between the two raised beds in the summer), I dug it up carefully enough to patch the front of the tortoise run and then re-lay the rest around the acer pot. If it survives, it will look great. If it doesn't, at least it's out of the way.

We ordered the pea shingle required for the rapid grid base, and that's currently sat on the drive. Next step was to move the tortoise run and raised bed. First thing was to mark out the required base area, which we did using the green tomato canes from last year, and after a bit of squaring up, were comfortable with the area we were aiming for.

So, we decided for various reasons that it's probably a good idea to keep 3 bedrooms in the house, but that meant I had nowhere to work. We decided to look into installing a garden office for me, to be my she-cave on retirement, but would allow me to work from home for however long I'm going to need to for the next few months. We don't know when bedroom 3 needs to be available again, but we decided that we'd make a pre-emptive strike.