More Moving, More Digging

We spent this weekend moving stuff around. We moved a bunch of boxes and shelves from storage upstairs into the basement, some things from the kitchen to the basement, a bookshelf from the bedroom to the downstairs back hall, books from the living room to the new bookcase, fasteners from the hallway to the basement, more books onto the bookshelves where the fasteners had been, a dresser from the upstairs storage to the back bedroom, Noel switched the location of his music books with my philosophy and literary criticism, and I unpacked a few boxes of books sitting around waiting to be given away. And some other stuff. Hard to remember it all, with all the work. But the main house is quite nicely open now, and the basement is still fairly roomy: it's nice to have a place to store things out of the way.

Noel and John are converting the upstairs bathroom, decommissioned in the foundation fun, into a temporary music studio. With the toilet and vanity gone, there's lots of room there, and we spent some time getting music stuff up there or over there, and non-music stuff out of there. Living with two musicians means there is music gear all over the house all the time, and we're all looking forward to having a pet-protected place to stash all that stuff, too.

OK, other stuff.

After we petered out on the moving-stuff thing, the sun was going down and the temperature had fallen enough to make digging some more possible. I got more done, and laid my first retaining blocks along the sloped path above my basin.

The idea with this path is to create a slope into the basin, so the walkway doesn't fill up with water as readily as last winter. So I'm sloping the path down to about six inches below where the original grade was, and then there will be a step or two (I'm still undecided on that) into the basin.

Retaining blocks on the pathway

I decided to try a different tactic in my approach that is making things a lot faster: instead of carefully carving out spaces for the retaining blocks, I'm digging a big deep hole all the way around and then filling it back in in the right contours. This is OK because a) we've only got sand here, and sand is what you use for backfill, and b) it's not like anything is going to be built on this.

The hole as a whole

To put this in perspective, I think this represents about three hours of digging, including the fact that I keep moving the discard piles around. It's not so much hard as it is boring.

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posted by ayse on 09/10/06