The move to Tuscany : Walling Wednesday

For whatever reason, I only got four hours of sleep last night - very out of character for me! I read until midnight (much later than I normally would) and once my eyes felt heavy and thought it safe to try, I was wrong. I lay there thinking how good it would be to get up at 6.30am with Helen, help with the animal chores so that she could start her own routine ten minutes earlier and therefore finish work a little earlier and so that I myself could skip working outside for the hottest part of the day, enjoy a slightly more leisurely lunch and do a few things indoors.

Well the plan seemed like it would be going out the window when I was still looking at the clock at 1:45am - I drove myself nuts with it but just couldn't switch my brain off for a second. Next thing I knew it was 5:45am and Lucca was demanding an early start of his own. The instant I snatched my feet further up the bed to avoid his claws getting a purchase on my toes (his idea of an alarm call) my brain fired out of the traps and was whirring, so I lay there as still as possible, trying not to ruin Helen's sleep until she finally turned the alarm off and got up and I was out of bed shortly after.

One of the things that spurred me on to get up early was that I had finally managed to arrange to get our broken Skype phone collected by the courier, and as per usual they could only be as specific as "between 9 am & 3 pm". That meant I'd be chained to the house, potentially for most of the day, and we currently had a car loaded full of rubbish that never quite made the trip to the bins last night (when the car had other ideas).

So, after a quick glass of grapefruit juice I was off up the drive with the first car load of rubbish and an hour and 45 minutes before 9am. I took the scatter approach today and on each of the four visits I used a different set of bins so I'd seen a fair bit of the valley before half eight, by which point I'd managed three loads, leaving just one more to squeeze in later after the courier had been.

After the frantic start to my day, I joined Helen for breakfast and then went to work outside. I went back to the dry stone walling efforts I'd begun yesterday at the bottom of the bank beneath goose island. The idea behind this is that, not only will it help improve the aesthetics of the parking area but it will also act as a retaining wall behind which I can bury a pile of rubble - rubble that is currently piled up looking a right mess on the area where the extension was going to be, but isn't any more... (still following?)

Work on the wall turned out to be slow going, especially when it involved rolling huge stones that were too big to lift from one side of the drive to the other, and then finding out that they didn't quite fit the space I needed to fill, so then having to set them aside for later and repeat. Anyway, by the time the courier arrived, the wall was starting to take shape and once he'd disappeared back off up the drive I turned my attention to clearing out the wood shelter (wood shelter number one, the one that we have pretty much emptied over winter). Now that I'm feeling a little more on top of things elsewhere, I'm starting to focus on the curb appeal of the parking area. Anyone who has visited us will agree that one side of the house is definitely the poor relation. This is all made up for once you get around to the front and see the views, but unfortunately the dreary parking area is the first glimpse of the house you get - so the push is on to do as much here before our steady stream of guests start arriving (which isn't far away!).

The grand plan is to build the aforementioned small wall, half-fill it with rubble (which will help tidy up the extension area, which we're stuck with until plans have been approved to render it), then fill it with soil to make a flower/shrub bed. The other part of the plan is to clear out the original wood shelter (now that we have an improved and extended wood shelter a little further along the drive) to make space for the (inherited) cultivator to live, alongside the lawn mower and eventually a little tractor - leaving us with a nice tidy little machine shelter instead. Finally, I plan to build a new screen which will both provide some privacy to the guests as well as hide most of the parking area from their view. I'm hoping this can be a wattle fence made from wood sourced from our own trees, but when I tried to dig some post holes today, I quickly hit solid stone (the stone that the geologist told us was there as part of his very expensive report last year). It's nice to know the house is built on good foundations, but not helpful right now.

Anyway, after a nice lunch on the patio together, I proceeded to forget about missing out the hottest part of the day. I say "forgot", but I had the last load of rubbish to get rid of and wanted to do it during the quieter lunch hours so went out and did that before returning to work (that was the point at which I forgot to avoid the sun).

The sun was beating down on the wall area so I opted to stay out of it and turned my attention back to the clearing of the wood shelter for the afternoon. Helen joined me at around 3pm and spent a couple of hours moving rubble and blocks to behind the wall and using a lump hammer to break it down into much smaller space-saving pieces before I started covering it with soil.

At just before 5pm we both gave in, feeling quite worn out. After first checking that the car would start (we didn't want poor Reggie to get his hopes up again, only to be disappointed), we went out for a dog walk. This time, we headed for Castelvecchio, hoping to find the other end of path #52 (a path we'd started out on from Sorana a few days ago, but lost our way). We did find a section of it on our way to the village, but failed to find where it came out in the village itself. We weren't too bothered though as we had a lovely walk around the charming little village before heading back home.