Ribh's D'Coopage

[Ribh]

they are hernia tempting, back breaking, and too difficult to set level.

lol It is slow going. Both my men would agree with your father. The roadside ones are 30mm thick to accommodate the car. I can't even lift them. John shouldn't. The lad doesn't like to. The good news is they are now all done & from now on the pavers aren't so thick & heavy because the only traffic is us & John got thinner pavers for the walkways. There is string~line everywhere for squaring things up. I can't see it, forget it's there & am constantly tripping over it.And we keep loosing the lad to the water because the weather has been spectacular & the fish are biting! However the lad's wife [understandably] wants her husband home so has booked his flight & bought his ticket. We lose him Sunday so they have to put in some big days & there is quite a lot of cutting in to do in places. John's marked out a lot of the fireplace but it is hard work.

It is generating a lot of neighbourly drive bys... We've wanted to do this for years but never had the funds until now.

 

[MaryJanet]

Your garden is lovely with its bees and chooks and fireplace

 

[Ribh]

Your garden is lovely with its bees and chooks and fireplace

Thank you, @MaryJanet. We find it lovely & the cats are thrilled with the big pavers. Apparently they are nice for lolling all over.

 

[Kris5902]

Looking great! Don’t get me wrong I love the large pavers... they are gorgeous, and of sandstone... so jealous! You just couldn’t convince me to try to install them again I had stone colored cement ones 2” thick and 18x24” set in a subway pattern for our patio... I was buying materials as we could afford them paycheck to paycheck, until my dad finally got annoyed at my slowly developing patio/half sand pit and bought enough to finish it for my birthday of course then I had to finish it ASAP to show him how much I appreciated it... it was a very long weekend and several extremely sore days following it. I thought bigger pavers would be easier I install as there are fewer of them. However, between the sloped yard, my skill set not being fully up to snuff, and the larger surface being less forgiving of slight level issues, I found them much more challenging to work with than the smaller ones (8x10”) for my pathways.

 

[rjohns39]

Evening Jeannie

 

[Ribh]

Hey, Bob.

 

[Ribh]

Yesterday was an odd day. Getting in or out of my house became problematic as my men folk were laying pavers @ the entrance so I decided I would make them a sweet treat. Back in the day when I was baking regularly for 5 children my standby recipe book was the CWA's cookbook [Country Women's Association]. I need to get me another one. Infallible. Simple. Easy. Foolproof. I never ever had a recipe screw up on me. Not once. However my youngest son took it to school one day & it never came home again. I have been lost without it because baking is an art & even the simplest recipes are prone to strange happenings. Like yesterday's jam drops. A recipe I've made thousands of times but this particular recipe was so short my biscuits spread like the black plague into ginormous monsters ~ apart from 4. Four turned out exactly like the pictures! And any recipe I've used for cupcakes says to cream your butter & sugar ~ not melt it... In the middle of this the lad arrived to say the chooks had broken out of Alcatraz & were making a dash for freedom. It sounded like a mass epidemic but it was only 3. The Campine, from long experience, knows how these things go & promptly shot back over the fence but the favorelles were far less inclined to co~operate & once in promptly made a beeline for the hole they came out of. The sooner we fix this the better! Meanwhile my grandson, all of not quite three, arrived via phone demanding to be shown the bees & the chickens & the kitchen...Why the kitchen & he's hard enough to understand in person, let alone via phone. One of the Favorelles is *his* ~ I seem to own an awful lot of other people's chickens: 3 *belong* to YD & GS claimed Luna ~love @ first sight.

Beautiful day & all my bigger girls decided to sunbathe together. The BRs got up as soon as they saw me because I might just have something to eat. The Campines were snuggled down together elsewhere & Lottie perches @ the highest point she can find & dozes.

Namaste was back roosting on the highest roost last night, which is a great improvement on huddling on the coop floor. Lavender, Ha'penny & Patricia all vied with Lottie for whatever was in my hand @ feed time & I had a dozen eggs to give away yesterday! I have a new layer. One of the favorelles who is laying a long, dark brown egg shaped like a torpedo. Today, more coop time, less run time I think. The girls need to understand the run is a privilege, not a right.Myself, I think they were just peeved because they couldn't see what was going on yesterday. They think the laying of paving great entertainment!

 

[rjohns39]

Morning folks

 

[Ribh]

Looking great! Don’t get me wrong I love the large pavers... they are gorgeous, and of sandstone... so jealous! You just couldn’t convince me to try to install them again I had stone colored cement ones 2” thick and 18x24” set in a subway pattern for our patio... I was buying materials as we could afford them paycheck to paycheck, until my dad finally got annoyed at my slowly developing patio/half sand pit and bought enough to finish it for my birthday of course then I had to finish it ASAP to show him how much I appreciated it... it was a very long weekend and several extremely sore days following it. I thought bigger pavers would be easier I install as there are fewer of them. However, between the sloped yard, my skill set not being fully up to snuff, and the larger surface being less forgiving of slight level issues, I found them much more challenging to work with than the smaller ones (8x10”) for my pathways.

I used the leftover bricks from the house to lay the original paths ~ nothing straight. Nothing even. Nothing level. Never occurred to me. I was more interested in not constantly tramping red mud through the house than the aesthetics of the thing but beautiful they were not!
Now I watch goggle eyed a long straight edge & level work construction marvels of straightness & neatness & smoothness! It is slow going though. Those big pavers are monsters to lay & my 3rd lad has been quite clear about not having monster tiles go up the bathroom walls. Pity. I was quite taken with the huge bathroom tiles...

 

[MaryJanet]

Hi Bob how's the trip going?