Drains!

Having just spent 2 weeks at home I'm feeling a bit of a fraud writing a blog called 'My Wales' when all I write about is our house in Somerset! I am absolutely loving our renovation project - it is the best job I have ever had. What an opportunity to redesign a house from scratch, and the garden.... I feel so peaceful whenever I am there and love every bit of it. This week I have been mapping all the physical features - trees etc so we can keep a record of the drains and water pipes we have been laying, and collect the names of the trees as we discover them.

This is where the engineer in me and all those years looking at plans is coming in useful. I don't seem to be able to think without a plan in front of me. We have sadly wrecked the lawn and laid pipes from the borehole to the shed, up to the house, and down to the veg patch, and put french drains in the lawn. Digging the trenches revealed why it was like a paddling pool last winter - the ground is solid clay except for a couple of inches of topsoil where the water sits. Now, hopefully, it will trickle through the gravel into the perforated pipes and run down to the field where we will one day - hopefully - have a pond. I can't wait for rain to see if it's working! Apologies to those who might find drainage boring - that was me too until this week!

Roger digging the trench across the lawn - 0.8m deep so the water doesn't freeze on its way to the house

then perforated drainage pipe laid 200mm below the surface -

and backfilled with gravel, then topsoiled and seeded (thanks Dad x)

....all under the watchful eye of freddy frog