At the end of an earlier blog post entitled ‘Finishing touches and next steps‘, I posted this picture of one end of the small room behind the kitchen and stated: ‘My plan is to decorate it to get rid of all the orange 😉 and then get Elefant to fit further matching units along the wall on the right, to store all those things that didn’t fit in the kitchen’.
On Wednesday 23rd May, just over two months after I wrote that post, my plan came to fruition when Martin from Elefant, came and fitted my chosen units. Before that, I spent many hours over several days, removing unwanted things attached to, or sticking out from, the walls, and filling the resultant holes. I then applied one coat of white emulsion to the ceiling and two coats, (because of the orange 🙁 ), to the walls. Below is a photograph of what has been achieved.
My apologies but, because of the size of the room, or more realistically, the lack of size, it is impossible to get a better photograph to illustrate what has been done. And I do still need to gloss paint the metal door frame, part of which you can see in the photo, as well as the window frame which you cannot see.
A year ago, at the end of a blog post entitled ‘Plenty to keep me occupied‘, I posted the photograph below, of an unsightly pile of earth in the back garden, that I wanted to get removed. As that earlier post explains, its origin was from the building of a retaining wall to hold back the earth at the back of the house, to prevent problems with damp.
Some months ago, I discovered that Rudolf Cebiš from the village, (Ruda to his friends 😉 ), owned a mini digger. I approached him and asked if he would be willing to come and rid me of my unwanted pile of earth. I did so, over a beer in Restaurace U Soni, in a mixture of limited Czech, sign language, and showing him this photograph taken in March this year.
Ruda agreed to do so. However, a combination of the mini digger being used on other work and then breaking down, meant that the day I had longed for, for just over a year, only finally happened on Tuesday 22nd May 2018.
That afternoon, the mini digger arrived, sitting on a trailer, towed by a tractor, driven by my near neighbour Petr Novak. Here it is, being unloaded on the driveway alongside my back garden, that gives access to the house behind mine. Petr then drove it into the garden, through a gap where a section of fence can easily be removed.
Petr soon got to work, breaking up the earth, in advance of it being put into the trailer on the other side of the fence. Various of my neighbours gathered around to watch the fun.
Milan, who is my immediate neighbour on the other side, hopped in the cabin and made his contribution to the project!
Within two hours, all was done. The earth taken away, then the mini digger loaded back onto the trailer, and my fence put back together. Now to landscape the bare patch……