august update – income & expenses report – the late edition

Sep29
by TFS on September 29, 2017 at 6:45 pm
Posted In: Budgets, TFS Updates

We made it to the beach! (Lancing if you were wondering where). 2 hours later it was p!ssing it down! 🙂

 

Another month done! Another high expense month! Waaah (etc)!

Of course those who paid any attention recently will know that this is mainly because we spent ~£1200 on our garden project. I’m starting to wonder how many one of expenses I can actually come up with before I just admit our budget should be about £2000 higher than predicted every year though even though this year I already baked in a lot of breathing room.

Anyway let’s get on with it, and apologies for the lateness of this update… been very busy, blah blah the usual excuses… 🙂

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the garden project – FINAL!

Sep13
by TFS on September 13, 2017 at 6:53 am
Posted In: DIY

Yes, another one of these guys! 🙂

 

It’s the final post!

“Yay” says my back!

“Yay” says all the readers who have no interest in DIY! 🙂

Anyway, here is what I got up to on a few odd half days here and there to finish it all up, plus the final budget/costings of the whole shebang…

 

Chainsawing

I bought a chainsaw for £60 which seemed ridiculously cheap, so I could cut up the sleepers we have in our garden. There were two reasons for this:

  1. So I could actually lift the buggers to get rid of most of them
  2. So I could cut them up into little brick sized portions to redo our borders

 

Cutting them up into more manageable lengths (these buggers are heavy!)

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the garden project – days 7, 8 and 9

Sep01
by TFS on September 1, 2017 at 8:57 am
Posted In: DIY

Another picture of this little guy… just because 🙂

 

We’re getting near the end of this series, “thank god” I hear you all say (along with my back).

So what did I get up to on days 7, 8 and 9? Let’s find out!

Just to bring you up to speed, I had last Friday “off”, and then as Saturday, Sunday and Monday were so hot I kind of did a few hours of work in the morning and then had the middle hours of the day as a break, then worked till about 7pm in the evening. So although they weren’t full days, they were probably near enough. I also had Wednesday off as it just hacked it down with rain all day and you can’t really do much with cement when the patio is covered in water.

On days 4, 5 and 6 (Thursday, Saturday, Sunday) I pretty much just dug out the base, laid it, compacted it and levelled it, as described in my last post here.

Anyway so days 7, 8 and 9 covered Monday, Tuesday and Thursday of this week and then we are fully back up to date.

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how to level a garden and lay a flat patio base

Aug30
by TFS on August 30, 2017 at 5:15 pm
Posted In: DIY, How To

(or… garden project days 4, 5 and 6)

Seeing as Vinny asked about levelling a garden I thought I would turn this update into a bit more of a “how to” post.

One thing to bare in mind having done this for pretty much the first time is that beforehand I thought it would be very complicated and hard to get everything level, but having done it, it was actually pretty simple*. So if you are worried about giving it a go I would say don’t, stop procrastinating, and just get on with it 🙂

*That’s not to say it’s not “hard” work, but it just wasn’t as complicated as I thought it would be.

A quick note… I am guessing some people may just want to know how to level a garden without actually laying a patio over the top, for example if you just wanted to lay some turf. I’ll write a few notes as I go about that as well but to be honest unless you require uber flat grass (putting green in the garden anyone…? 🙂 ) then you can just do that with a bit of grunt work with the shovel and use you eyes in my opinion. Anyway with that said here is…

How to level a garden and lay a flat patio base

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the garden project – days 2 and 3 (theres a rat in mi garden what am me gonna do!?)

Aug23
by TFS on August 23, 2017 at 7:50 pm
Posted In: DIY

I said I’d post something every day but that did seem a bit over the top, and in all honesty the picture after day 2 didn’t look that different from day one anyway so it seemed a bit pointless posting them up last night!

Anyway, here is what I’ve been up to on days 2 and 3.

 

Tuesday (day 2)

Welcome children! The word of the day today is…

HEAVY

Honestly, I was seriously considering changing the name of this post series to “Project back f*ck”.

Today I had to:

  • Lift all the wood from the front and back garden into a hire van.

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