incremental progress

That last minute

Had a highly productive weekend. R got up on Saturday and started ripping into the deck, and got a fair bit up (we are removing the swimming pool at last!). Then the friend turned up and R had another man helping him, and I think they got all of the timber that you walk on up, and quite a bit of the supporting timber (beams and piles). There was no concrete involved in the support of the deck, which was great - I have saying for ages that it was a cheap thing that would fall apart in a year or two, and now the husband thinks the same thing. All bitty timber hobbled together, and lots of short cuts, like not using flat head nails or treated timber. I went with G to the plant shop and bought another rose while the men were doing the man thing of destruction - so girly and so good.

The Sunday was very fine here so we went over to their house to share the love, and do work there. We gardened and gardened, which was really mainly scrub clearance. And rose pruning. It looks a whole lot better and we took a truck load of rubbish away so it really looked better. Cos I am a legend for making a tidy garden and a messy lawn by not clearing away the rubbish.

Then we took a big tree down which was blocking a lot of light in their house and the neighbours house. All the branches came off really well, and no-one fell out of the tree. But when we took the trunk down it fell on the house and broke a window and the windowsill too. And the phone line which was tangled in the branches, which we had successfully freed, and then broke at the last minute with the trunk. We feel really bad about that - we are the ones who are supposed to know what we are doing, and with hindsight we know now we should have cut the trunk in sections so it wouldn't have been big enough to fall on the house. And used the truck to pull the trunk over so it went towards the road. Ahh hindsight.

We know we did lots of really good stuff, but that last minute has killed all the good feelings. The worst part is we have almost exactly the same thing at our house - a cheap fast growing tree in the phone line. It also has no branches any more and is a trunk which is waiting to come down. But we will do a better job on our tree having learnt so much on theirs.

And we are not going to enjoy having that knowledge.

Posted by Toni at August 28, 2006 08:28 AM