Another caravan fire

We can now truthfully say that the caravan is well and truly gone, no more, deceased!  The scrap man has been with his oxyacetelene (I'm sure that's not how you spell it) torch and cut up the chassis and he's taken that away along with the aluminium.  He's weighed it in and split the money between him and us giving us £70 . . . . I'm not sure that we've had such a good deal on all that really, but, hey ho.  I don't really know what else we could do.  If we'd cut it up with the disc cutter we'd have had to buy loads of discs and then lots of trips to town to get rid of it, so we wouldn't have made much more out of it in the end.

On Sunday we had a good big bonfire and got rid of the scrap wood. I was a t work until 4pm so Bob started it after lunch and we were out there until gone 7pm, so it took a while. But, you can't beat a good bonfire and it was a significant one - clearing away one stage of this project ready for the next one, the workshop and as that was one of the main reasons for this move, it felt quite momentous!



That piece of plywood is actually in mid-flight although
it doesn't look like it on the picture.



It was quite a blustery day and the wind acted
as a wonderful set of bellows and got the flames
leaping quite high at times.  The overhanging hawthorne
is now a little curly!

And, of course, having put the last piece on we celebrated
in the traditional manner!

Our next job is to dismantle the wriggly tin barn.  This is probably reasonably old and has been really useful for storage.  Probably though I will miss the undercover washing line we rigged up in there which has been so useful (especially with this delightful summer weather we've been having).  It is now just about empty and ready for dismantalization.  There are pieces of railway track concreted into the ground which are attached to the upright timbers and then clad all round with wriggly tin.  It is quite high, so it'll be interesting getting the roof off - no doubt, one of those jobs that'll be fine once we get on with it.

We have taken a couple of wall panels off, just to give us an idea of how easy it's going to be . . . . not too bad is the verdict.  We just need to re-home Bob's motorbikes temporarily until their new store has been built.  Luckily Roy has very kindly agreed to livery them with the horses (they don't need as much feeding, mucking out or exercise as the horses!).

I think the chickens might also miss the
barn as they have made themselves a
lovely deep bath in the dry dust and mud  and spend many a happy hour making themselves beautiful in there!  I think we may have to build them a little shelter
where they can make another bath!

This week I haven't done any extra hours at work so I haven't had to be in after Monday's shift until 7am tomorrow (Saturday) and so we went on a grand tour of the family.  We started at Mum and Dad's in Norfolk on Tuesday (had to fix a leaking radiator pipe on the car while we were there as the engine got a tad hot on the way over and it took 3 litres of water to top the radiator up - oops!).  Then the next day we went to Peterborough to Jan's (Bob's stepmum) calling on the way to see Sophie, my niece, to find out how her trip to Nepal to do her Duke of Edinburgh Gold went (very well I think apart from the leeches and toilets, yuk on both counts there apparently).  At Jan's we set to clearing out the two garden sheds - loads and loads of useful and useless stuff that accumulates over the years to sort though and lots of trips to the tip.  It made us appreciate our nice, new tip in Oswestry as the Peterborough one is a bit of a nightmare if there are more than three cars there and in the pouring raining climbing the steps up to the skips is a bit dodgy (at ours all the skips are below the level of the car bit so you can just drop stuff in).  We then had an evening and overnight at Ben's -it's his birthday tomorrow, so it was nice to see him for a bit although rather brief as they had to go to bed quite early ready for work today.  All in all (and apart from the car) it was a good trip and nice to catch up with everyone.