Getting the life/hedge balance right!

Never mind that old thing about getting the life/work balance right, just now we're having to contend with the life/work/hedge balance!  For the last few weeks I'm either working or hedge-laying it seems!  Most days off seem to involve a bit of hedging somewhere along the line.  Still, the end is in sight aand I think we've got about 10m left to do.  We seem to have managed quite well with felling the bigger trees with Bob on the chainsaw and me (and Ben if he's around) on the end of a rope in the field.  More by luck than design, they have fallen very gracefully just about where we want them to which is a bit of a bonus.  We have this system of attaching a rope as high up as we can reach and then Bob cuts a wedge out of the side we want it to fall (standard practice) and then he cuts almost, but not quite, through the other side.  Then with my superior strength pulling on the rope the tree gently topples over.  Anyone watching might even be fooled into thinking we know what we're doing!  We did have a three-man tree to do this morning - actually two trees that had grown twined round each other and completely covered in ivy.  It was quite windy too, but luckily Ben was around to help and so we managed it without too much of a problem.  It's funny, we spent quite a while discussing how to do it, should we try and chop one first, untangle the ivy, have two ropes (one for each tree), try to climb up and cut a big branch off . . . . . in the end we said 'sod it just chop them both together and lets see what happens!' .  So, that's what we did and it was fine.

This is a bit deceptive and foreshortens it quite a bit - it's
quite long really, honest!

Rob and Becky are going to have to have a massive bonfire at some point - we've been piling all the branchy stuff for them on the other side of the field and then made lots of piles of wood for cutting for firewood along the edge of the hedge as we go along.  They have some catching up to do, but it should keep them going for quite a while!

The loneliness of a long-distance road sweeper!

Now that all the leaves and needles have fallen off the trees, Ben kindly spent a day clearing our lane.  It's surprising how thick the layer of sludgy stuff becomes.  Half the lane is fairly smooth tarmac and that's relatively easy to shovel up, but then the far end is quite rough and it is really hard work.  Sensibly, Ben started with the difficult end (there, can you just see him all that way away . . . he's got quite a lot left to do hasn't he?!), last year when I did it I started with the easy bit and it ended up taking me about three days!  So, now we need a good downpour to rinse off the remains.  Poor Ben pulled a muscle or something in his leg doing this and so is hobbling a bit.

Guess what this is? . . . . . . 

. . . . . hard to believe, but this is actually going to be a kitchen cupboard . . . . for us!!!!!  This will replace the caravan cupboard and worktop we are still using.  It has taken about 18 months to get this far because Bob had started it and just roughly cut the timber to size when he started making the pub furniture out of scaffold boards and got really busy with that, and then started making proper furniture for other people, doing shows and so on and so this got put on hold.  He could have just done a quick job on this, but we'd always planned that this would be a proper piece of furniture with dovetailed drawers etc and so we're sticking to that - it'd be a shame to bodge it.  We have a big slab of slate from a snooker table for the top and this Oak is all quite local, so it should look lovely when it's done.

Bob and I are going away for a couple of days tomorrow leaving Ben house/chicken sitting.  Before Christmas we planned to have a couple of nights in Hereford and do a bit of Christmas shopping, go and see the Mappa Mundi (a map of the world from the days of the crusades which, incidentally, a chap we know locally has just re-framed) and the Chained Library and generally mooch around.  We didn't go then though because we were going to have visitors, then we weren't, then we were, and then we weren't and by the time that was decided it was too late to go and so now we finally have it planned (but we won't have to do Christmas shopping which is a bonus!).

We have snow on the ground at the moment - just a very thin layer, but a couple of weeks ago we had quite a lot and Ben took this photo of dawn making our house glow!