The great reshuffle continues...

First there was the levitating shed...then I got excited thinking that I might be getting proper compost heaps soon! But no, the Engineer had apparently decided that he wanted to press on with the re-siting of the greenhouse before compost heaps...sob.

Hmm...so at the peak of dryness after the driest warmest 3 weeks of spring ever, he chose to start hand digging out the trench for the new concrete wall foundations. Not my idea but hey - I wasn't the one doing it.

So pretty much all spare time last weekend he spent stripping turf, digging and then creating a wooden frame for the concrete, until at last it looked like this:

Admittedly, it doesn't look like it will be moving far, but this sideways shift will free up the rest of a much more usable compost bay and 'yard' type space between it and the shed.  Furthermore, as he is raising it onto a layer of breeze blocks before bolting the frame base down, I will also be gaining much needed headroom inside (as the current situation was set up for grandma, who is at least a foot smaller than me) and so the Engineer and I will no longer run the daily risk of bashing our head on the glass.  Coldframes are planned too (I am far too excited about this) but these will have to be constructed once the whole greenhouse has moved as space is a bit tight at the moment, as you can see.

Of course, the working week then took priority, and I took the time to move my precious babies in pots to a less risky location, as well as sorting out the loan of a cement mixer so that all this stuff didn't have to be mixed on a board...

...and bless him, just after lunchtime yesterday the concrete base was complete!

Today (while I take over child ferrying duties to rugby and taekwondo) he plans to press on with the bit he finds the scariest - laying the breeze blocks (and more to the point, getting them level....).  I thought it safest to leave him to it.

Reminds me of when I was a child, and my dad could no longer put off and avoid getting on with whatever DIY or garden construction job my mum had been waiting for months (sometimes years!) for him to do.  We definitely made ourselves scarce for the duration!!! Purple clouds of previously unheard of Anglo Saxon would be heard, and a general aura of bad temper.  Trouble was, he was actually very good at building stone walls and laying patios etc as he was very thorough and quite perfectionistic once he actually got going! Stopping him was another matter.  But he didn't enjoy it at all.  And they didn't have the money to pay someone else to do what he was capable of doing himself. It remains a family joke to this day that for some reason every house we moved to had a garden on a slope of some kind, which ultimately mum would demand was nicely terraced and patio'd so she had pretty retaining walls to plant up and maintain easily.  He said it was his purgatory on earth...

Meanwhile, as the Engineer was busily pouring concrete foundations he was also supposed to be supervising the children (as I had a Beekeeping Association Apiary visit afternoon), and when I got home he showed me these reassuring shots:

Is this what we call 'daddy supervision'??? Turns my spine to ice.  She knows that when I'm home she's not allowed above that first branch over the trampoline.

Fortunately Leo had opted for a less extreme entertainment:

...punctuated apparently with more frenetic bouts of Lego construction which resulted in the lounge carpet truly looking as if we'd been burgled by the time I got home.

But the first borage flowers are out! A legitimate call to crack open the first Pimms of the season if ever there was one xxx