It’s grim up north.

We planted 22,000 saplings over two years from 2007 - 2009… maturing nicely now

As a teenager a worked with planting spruce in Sweden. 200 in an hour.

Live in rural Sweden. A lot of trees on the property. Most birch, hazel and salix. I prefer oak and pine. 1.6 hectare.

Another vote here for trees. We've got no idea how many we've got but we are going to add to them. Need a few more fruit trees.

We have ash trees growing like weeds and getting in the way. Plus a line of willows that we think were coppiced in the past. Might start doing that again once we run out of fallen timber for the log pile (might be a good few years yet!).

Ed

Not quite, we had about 12 big planting party weekends… loads of friends, family and neighbours with plenty of food and drink.

Good to see so much tree love. Were all a bunch of f-king hippies really.

I’d like to have more space to plant an orchard or Similar, but as it stands what I have fits well enough around what I need the space for. It’s also got that ‘old farmyard’ vibe going on, of trees around the edge of the main space.

Talking of that, the next step was some wanton destruction great fun careful and considered landscaping. Where the new fence had been put through both mine and my sisters side needed levelling out of various lumps and bumps that were a bit beyond a shovel and wheelbarrow. What I needed was a digger with a blade. and I needed to do a few other jobs down the bottom that will be detailed below. This was planning ahead by a long way, but doing so saved me double or triple which I’ll explain as I go.

After scraping my sisters drive flat and levelling some old raised beds, I move round to mine and I started at the top and removed the crest from the middle of the drive and pushed it back out into the divots. As much as I like that ‘worn in’ look of an old track, I was scraping with cars of mine I don’t even consider to be low, so it had to be levelled out a bit.


The central area was fairly flat, it only needed minor moving around of dirt to fill in a few holes and level things up.


It was packed down level again by driving the transit back and forth over it a lot.


The employees ‘helping’


Next job was this massive sycamore root ball in the back corner.



It ended up so deep to remove it I ran out of reach on the digger boom!
It took a good while but I got it out and backfilled.


The reason it needed to come out was so I could grade and level this area.


This whole corner was dug out between 12-18” deep and levelled off, for a 40ft by 18ft area. This was as big as I could comfortably put in the area where the old sheds were, my constraints being the walnut tree at one end and the apple tree at the other.


This produced quite a lot of spoil.


Which was spread across the whole lower yard area to level it, originally it had a high spot that would be straight in front of you here that I skimmed off a little, and the left and side and the back behind the tree dropped away quite a bit.


Now it’s a lot flatter.


You can see here where I pushed it back past the tree then drove the transit over it a lot again to pack it all down. There was still a bit of rake and shovel work to finish it totally due to tight space under the tree, but the worst of it was sorted.


This leaves me with the makings of a large base in this corner, and a considerably flatter oversite. I was getting massively ahead of myself here, but 3 day digger hire isn’t much more than 1 day, and it gave me somewhere to lose a LOT of rubble as hardcore, saving me massively on waste disposal when it came to the house works. And realistically if I didn’t do this putting right before I started moving things here it would never get done and I’d always regret it.


The last job was to meet one of the mrs. criteria for moving here. Back in Suffolk we had a pond that she loved because of the wildlife it attracted. She wanted one here, and since I had a digger at my disposal I picked a sensible place and dug her one twice the size. Still not huge by any means but enough to fill the space available and still be manageable. As long as it attracts frogs and dragonfly’s etc. it’s done it’s job.


My parents came round to check on the destruction improvements.


This corner worked well as it was partially under the holly tree, and I managed to keep a few of the established shrubs that were here. Note the pile of cobbles against the fence too- you dig them up everywhere here, but at quite a depth- about a foot down. I do wonder if the whole farmyard has them, just under a huge buildup of ground level over the years.


And that was that for that little session. It’s almost 3 years to the day since I did this, nov 2020.

its amazing how much better a space can look once you remove a lot of unwanted 'stuff' and cut the grass.

Tbh I’m at the stage with this thread where I’m struggling to remember how/when things happened. This period was S.T.R.E.S.S. Sorting everything out with a diminishing timescale, and I was spending most of my time loading, unloading, or driving a van.




I’d cleared out the garage as much as possible, so I could take a bit of stuff up I was definitely keeping to go in there. The priority was emptying the Suffolk house though, as I think we’d sold it by this point, or at least knew who was buying it even if it wasnt finalised.






But the big news was this-












7 radiators and a combi boiler later, we had a big tick next to the central heating requirement.
The work wasnt to my standard(more about that later), I’ve already redone some of it and more will get done over time, but that was kinda always the plan as I wasn’t springing for proper cast iron rads at this point. They will be added in room by room at a later date as the cosmetic state of each room requires it. It cost something like 3.5k to get this in and working, it was over 5 with the fancy rads. Me standing over them and/or me doing the cutting and lifting lead to a minimum of floorboard damage though which was my major concern give the entire house is plumbed under the boards as it’s the only way of hiding stuff. The system works adequately and keeps the house warm which keeps the mrs happy. After some arguing I got them to relocate and sign off all the gas piping as aprt of the original quote, in return for them not having to run the hot water through from the bathroom to the kitchen. Given the state of their pipework layout and soldering I saw this as a good deal 😉, the gas pipe got routed under the floor as part of this with a place for me to tee into it to drop a pipe down the kitchen wall for the cooker. Their ‘core’ work on the boiler and pipework is pretty much all hidden, and I can tidy up any radiator related stuff one by one.

what gets me is the guy who fits it often isn't qualified/ registered either, some other person signs it off, if your lucky he comes round and has a look!

I just do windows myself, fitting them well and avoiding thermal bridges needs care and some planning, most of the fitters just seem to want to do it in the quickest possible way.

Another month, another van load of stuff. Here’s my niece ‘helping’ unload, which mostly involved playing with the dog…


Things were getting Serious, it was about six weeks til contract exchange date now so we were starting to remove non essential furniture from the house and move it up, even though the house was still rather rough looking. Our big bookshelves and everything on them were on that list.






As was some shelving from the kitchen and utility rooms which I put straight up at this end.






I was also starting to move some workshop stuff, parts i definitely needed to keep had been boxed up, and the first couple of cabinets moved into the garage to house them all.






The dogs were seriously nonplussed by this…