When we purchased the property 6 years ago, we had a swamp around the back of the house which was contributing to damp within the house. The improvement of this situation was a high priority and, since we were living and working in Switzerland at the time, we had to engage a contractor to do the work.
The scope of the job included digging out the swamp, gluing a thick membrane against the house, putting steel reinforcing down, pouring concrete, spreading sand and laying concrete pavers.
When we finally managed to get to Italy to view the work, we noticed that the contractor had stopped short of the required area by about 1 metre, which meant that the edge of the pavers stopped halfway across our pizza oven!
This has annoyed us for 6 years so a few months ago we decided to correct it.
We started by purchasing another 2 pallets of concrete pavers and transporting them up our little valley. We don't have the most efficient of logistic solutions here. Delivery trucks are too large and heavy to turn around at the house so we ask them to drop off at the beginning of the driveway. Then we attach our unregistered trailer to our car and drive down the driveway. We load the trailer by hand, then unload it by hand when we get back to the house. Grossly inefficient and exhausting but good for our fitness!
This lovely pile of concrete pavers has been waiting to be laid all summer...but a 2 month heatwave has procluded us from doing anything with them!
This week we have had the most glorious days; cool early mornings, sunny later, mid 20 temperatures, no humidity. Perfect for heavy activity.
When you're an amateur, digging and flattening out, spreading and smoothing sand, laying and tapping pavers and measuring levels on two dimensions takes forever! After an 8 hour day, we still hadn't finished and had to return to it the following day. By the end of that day, we had everything laid but had to go back for a third day to build a stone wall to support the path, cut pavers for the edges of the path and concrete the perimeter.
While we were at it, we laid a whole new path in front of the fienile and re-laid one of 2 stone walls that needed to be elevated.
Tonight we celebrate the end of a job that has taken 6 years.
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