42 bags filled with old birds nests!

When I got home from work yesterday my builders excitedly told me they had removed the big birds nest.   The one I referred to as the elephants nest as it was so huge.  It stood to about chest height and was made up of twigs, straw and sheep's wool.  

Imagine the size of a 56lb sack of spuds... you know the big sack size, or the size of a big bag of compost or a big sack of animal feed.   Well, apparently the guys started dismantling the nest just after lunch and by 4pm they had filled 42 bags!   They then carried it down through the house and across the garden decanted it into dumpy bags inside my barn. I went down to the barn in the dark with my torch  and found 3 x 1 ton dumpy bags stuffed full of birds nest ! 

You just cannot imagine how large and how heavy that would have been.... It must have been there for years and years.. I am so glad its been removed. 

Ive been looking forward to this weekend all week.  His nibs was away all of last week, and also away for the weekend (partying)  so he didn't get home til late Sunday evening,  so this weekend was the first one we had spent together for a couple of weeks. I just couldn't wait for this morning to arrive I knew we would be doing something exciting..how right I was.  Armed with the wrecking bar, hammer and saw he started work on dismantling the framework that was inside the hidden doorway.  The door way was blocked with hardboard which was nailed to a frame work that filled the void inside.  With the iron bar and saw,  the wood was wrenched away until we met up with the plasterboard on the other side.  One massive wallop with the hammer and a hole was made through.  I was on one side of the wall , he on the other side ... we peered through the hole at each other grinning.  I filmed it.  He did that Jack Nicholson grimacing scary face through the hole.." Here's Johnny"  we laughed like mad.

The door way is about 20 inches deep, through a stone wall and the floor was made of wooden floorboards, but the floor of the doorway was completely rotten , so we removed the floorboards in this section  and also  the timbers below which were so old and worm eaten they were as light as a feather and crumbled to dust.  This then left us with a void that needed filling to make a solid threshold.

After a quick trip up to the builders merchants this afternoon  we bought some bags of  cement, ballast and sand and have spent the last hour down in the barn making concrete in the cement mixer.  First we cleaned out the space, lined it with damp proof course and then poured the concrete into the floor space where we took up the floorboards.

He did all the mixing and barrowing it up from the barn into the kitchen.  I did the spreading and levelling..it was just like putting icing on a Christmas cake !  

x
Jo