real patio

Most of the garden work has been on preparing the ground and starting to lay the new patio.  New as in a new place, but we are using the slabs from the previous patio, with their lovely patina of lichens.

parallel progress

The frame for the conservatory is installed!  No glass yet, though.  The installers claim they are waiting for the pond people to finish, so that there is no chance of damaging the glass.  But I happen to know they haven't even got the glass delivered yet.

So, as this slowly progresses, we have moved from having an expensive unusable patio, to an expensive unusable pergola...

Meanwhile, the pond work continues, with the path hard core laid out in the right places.

the wrong blue lines

The pond work continues, with shuttering around the back edge for building the path, and blue lines on the ground marking out where the rest of the paths go.  The blue lines are in the wrong place.

pond work starts

We had carefully planned to have the new conservatory finished well before we started having work done on the pond.  Oh well.

The large pond in garden was initially successful, but we’ve been having trouble keeping it full since we had some shading trees removed.  Hot summers lead to rapid evaporation.  (Not that this summer has been hot, of course.)  Also, the conservatory has led to reduced planting areas.  

So the idea is to slim the pond down, surround it with a path, and change half of it into a sunken garden (with a much smaller second pond in its centre, to be nicely recursive).

Today that work started, with a tiny wee digger grubbing out the old pond, leaving a quagmire.

snaking downpipe

Today saw the first movement on the conservatory build since the end of July.  (The glazing has been delayed, several times.)  The downpipe had originally been rerouted with temporary fxings, to allow the end wall to be built, although bizarrely the bricklayer just bricked round it.

It has now been properly rerouted, leaving a small hole (visible halfway down the wall), hopefully to be filled in later...

Glazing is promised for next week.  Maybe.

Random use of candles

I've blogged about variants of Total Eclipse of the Heart before, from Total Eclipse of the Flowchart, and of the Lego, of the lockdown, and even of a slash/Spirk video.

I like the original song, but the original video is definitely ... weird.  Recently, there was a BoingBoing piece suggesting that the song is actually about vampires (making it even more SFnal-resonant!)  And one of the comments points to a description of that video, set to a rather familiar tune.  Enjoy: