I've been busy recently with family stuff, so garage work has been put on hold for a while. But when I was last there I did make a start on sorting out the rough-looking corner of land where my fence angles in and creates a little triangle of ground, still within my boundary but outside the fence.
As part of Operation Make It Look Nice I decided to tidy this little area up.
The situation is slightly complicated because there's a massive drainage chamber right on the boundary line, mostly under the street but partly within my land, too. It's a junction between two storm drain pipes from the roadside drains, which become one pipe that carries on under my Tarmac entrance area, through another chamber (seen in some of my gate photos), and eventually empties into the stream.
Here's what I started with - a muddy mess. The red bricks are the wall of the drainage chamber. Because my yard is so much lower than the road, the chamber sits
above my ground level. The stone wall has been built on top of the chamber. Because the fence now angles in, I want to move the wall to follow the fence, inside the fence line.
Here I'm moving a few big stones into position to become the new base of the wall. It's like building Stonehenge!
I had a look inside the chamber, which is huge - far bigger than you'd think from the size of the inspection cover. Weirdly, the cover doesn't sit squarely on its brick supports. It's been deliberately placed at an angle. I suppose this was done so the cover would sit square to the edge of the pavement, which makes it look nice and neat on the surface. But it looks very odd when you open it...
When the stone wall was built it seems someone knocked out a few of the bricks which the inspection cover rested on, and replaced them with odd bits of stone...which fell out as soon as I started breaking up the wall. I think a proper repair will be needed here.
Fortunately I have no shortage of building materials. The site was littered with bricks (several different types), blocks, paving slabs, and of course there's that big pile of stones out the front. So I ended up with a handy construction materials stockpile without having to buy anything. (Oh, the white thing is a paper towel dispenser from the toilet. The paper towels had been inside it so long they'd turned into compost, but I think the dispenser is good to go again!)
First thing to do - clean up the damaged corner. And then dig out a few red engineering bricks from my pile. This pic really shows how far the inspection cover sits off-square.
Bricks in - plain old cement mortar here, no fancy stuff with lime mortar. This chamber dates from 2006, when the present road alignment was made, so it's all done with modern materials. The pipes inside are plastic.
I also decided to put a proper edge along the pavement. I think at some point it would have had concrete edging slabs of some sort, but they've long gone. With a little help from the angle grinder, I cut some old paving slabs to the appropriate sizes. Here they're placed alongside the Tarmac just to check that they fit.
Pavement edge concreted in place, with some rather haphazard shuttering. There's still a little gap where the inspection cover doesn't sit squarely on its brickwork, but I have a plan for that...
This is the plan. An edging strip cut to size with the angle grinder. It'll cover the gap nicely.
There was another section of missing edging slabs where the Tarmac entrance apron meets the pavement. I decided to build this up with a couple of bricks and cut another edging strip to go on top.
And that's the result. Quite neat - the edging strip is bedded in concrete but I had a bit of mortar left over so I gave it some quality benching as well. It's almost a shame that this will be hidden when the earth goes back on top.
Strictly speaking it's not my responsibility to do any of this. I should have reported the defects via the council's road repairs hotline.....and then waited six months for them to come and fix it. More than six months, I should think, since a slightly ragged inner edge to a pavement is never going to be a priority.
But this way the job gets done quickly, and nobody asks any awkward questions about how the brickwork of the inspection chamber was damaged in the first place. I don't want to take the blame for something the previous people did.
Now that the edging has been fixed, I can get on with demolishing the redundant bit of the wall. Here most of the original run of the wall - straight along the boundary line - has been taken apart. You can see just how big the drainage chamber is, as more of its bricks become visible. The top of the chamber is a massive concrete slab - it's like an air raid shelter.
Eventually the wall will be properly built up, with the stones mortared together. But for now I just did a dry run, to give me an idea of what it'll look like, and get some idea of how many usefully-shaped stones I have to hand. A few shovels of of earth on the outside area and all of a sudden it starts to look quite respectable.
When it rains heavily this bit of the road sometimes floods, and the water comes over the pavement (you can see the muddy area where it turns into a puddle), goes over the edge of my boundary and down into the yard. There's not much I can do to stop this from happening. If I built up the boundary with some sort of high kerb the water would just go along a bit and end up going down my Tarmac entrance apron. It's best to deal with any water here, where it can be persuaded to soak away through the earth. The wall, when it gets properly built, will have strategically placed weep holes in it,.
The view from inside. Operation Make It Look Nice moves a few steps forward.
A few daffs on that little triangle of ground, and it'll look fine when spring is here!
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