Inside and out

Yesterday I had loaded up a trailer-full of earth from our soon-to-be neighbour's building site. This is hard work, so I left off the task of unloading it for today.



It perhaps doesn't look all that much but I would guess it's a ton or more: the car felt pretty heavy with the full trailer, and it's a good thing that the round trip isn't much more than half a mile (or for the metrically inclined, substitute a tonne and a kilometer).

It's going to smooth out the slope at the edge of the grassed area by the terrace, so that I can eventually mow the grass up the slope, rather than let the weeds grow on it until I can get the strimmer out (once a year, maybe). I don't quite have a "before" picture, as I had already dumped one trailer-load in there earlier in the week. I'd also removed, this morning, some lumpier bits at the top to get a better slope. So this is what it then looked like:



and then the picture below is definitely "after". I also cut away a couple of the apple-tree's lower branches, as I didn't want to be poked in the eye while standing on the trailer to shovel out the earth.



After that I had a go at a bit of tidying up in the kitchen of the farmhouse. The corner where the dustbin sits ("poubelle corner") usually has a small wooden table to cover the dustbin. Without it, there's a nasty gap at the end of the tiling, where the pipes all showed, and a hole in the tiled wall originally giving access to the stopcocks (and drain valves) for the bathroom water supply. All pretty ugly.

So I slapped up a bit of plasterboard over the gap in the end, and, preparatory to putting a small cut piece of plasterboard in the access hole, I glued in a tile behind it to stop the plasterboard just falling through the hole. Like this:



The tile is almost the same size as the hole, but it goes in diagonally and fills enough space to do its job. The glimpses of blue in the top corners of the hole are the new PER water pipes feeding the bathroom: the black mould at the bottom edge is, I imagine, due to the drain cocks soaking the chipboard a couple of times a year for the last thirty years.

Now the corner looks like this:



and, yes, it is a pity I couldn't find enough of the original tiles to fill the gaps completely. But normally it's a dark corner behind the dustbin. I was lucky to find a very dusty and even more cobwebby box in the attic with the few tiles to do the more visible bits. But, maybe, next time I might use white tiles instead?

The wall isn't very vertical, is it? It'll all look better with some grout and a dab of white paint.