Todays post in English
When I first moved into my house, there was a little lawn in front of the house….
Totally useless!!
Especially in Bergen where lawn has a tendency to be constantly wet…
I am not fond of lawn mowing or a lawn full of snails for that matter…
So it was quickly decided that it had to go.
We wanted paving stones instead
Looks pretty nice doesn’t it?
At the other side of the house there was a steep uncultivated slope…
Totally useless as well…
My house from the backside, it was red with green sills when we bought it
So we dug up the hole lawn on the front side and threw it over the fence and down the slope at the back side.
We thought we did something a bit illegal…
so we did it in the evening after dark…
It turned out that the steep slope was also mine..
a part of the property…
And when I own something, of course I have to do something with it…
Especially when it is totally useless as it is…
So another project entered my mind ( but didn’t become a reality before some years later)
My plan was to build a parking lot, with stairs going up to the house and a little garden.
And with my self-confidence of course I started the work my self. I had to dig up all the masses that we had thrown over the fence as well as much more that was already there. And I dug and dug, shovel after shovel – walked over the road and threw it into another steep slope….
After some days of hard work, with little visible effect, I realized that this would be to much work….even for me…. 🙂 and that I also couldn’t throw tons of masses down into the woods…
I ended up hiring some workers, an excavator and someone to remove the masses…. and later on, someone to build us a brick wall to keep the masse that would remain in place..
Finally it was my turn;
I built up the garden with logs, as the Spanish did, in steep slope if you have seen them? They admittedly used stones, but still the principles is the same..
I thought it worked out pretty nice!
So now we had a parking lot, a garden, but to walk around the house was a pretty long walk…. so of course we had to build a staircase as well…
We had never done that before, so we got a little stuck…. I examined the possibility of getting some professionals to do it, but it was quite expensive….. and we did want to manage our self…
So with a little input from some friends we went ahead.
I started to dig and prepare the ground were the staircase would be – I had a week off while my boyfriend was working…
When the actual building of the stairs started, I had been out clubbing with my brother the night before and ended up being a hangover-observer while my boyfriend was working….
He did such a good job and the stairs were getting closer hour by hour..
The next day we were suppose to work on this, I had plans to go to a wine club with my friends… I was all dressed up and ready to go soon…
So then I was a wine drinking observer while my boyfriend was working…
I realize that this was turning out to be quite unevenly distributed labour and if I was going to get any cred for this staircase I had to wake up!
So we finished the last stairs and got the railing up together.
It might not be a perfect staircase – maybe not the coolest one you have seen either….
But it works and we are quite proud of it our self!!
I JUST LOVE PHYSICAL LABOUR! IT IS SO REWARDING!!
forfatterwannabe 