Tag Archives: concrete hardstanding

Monday 10th August 2015 – MY PATIENCE IS NOW THOROUGHLY EXHAUSTED …

… and my good humour has now totally disappeared. I am never ever going to help anyone out ever again.

hyundai trajet leak oil on concrete drive les guis virlet puy de dome franceJust look at my beautiful concrete hardstanding.

I worked on old wrecks for years at Gainsborough Road in Crewe, and despite everything that was thrown at me, my drive there never ever looked anything like this.

But here I am, having spent a fortune on concreting my drive last summer so that I would have somewhere nice to work in my dotage, and this is what I get for helping someone out.

The guy who owns this old wreck came round to try to finish it off, but forgot to connect up the oil pipe. As a result, when he turned over the engine, I got the contents of his sump all over my concrete.

And if that isn’t enough to be going on with, he wandered off to think of a plan B, not only leaving his car in my drive but making no attempt to clean up the damage. That’s all over where people walk into my property of course, and it’s all soaked into the concrete and thoroughly ruined it.

Consequently tomorrow, as soon as I come back from Gerzat, his Hyundai is going out into the street regardless of whatever else happens. I’ll tow it out with the Kubota, get it as far away from my premises as possible, and then just leave it for whoever wants to remove it.

and if you are wondering why I waited until Tuesday to publish this, had I published this last night before I went to bed, as I usually do, there would have been nothing that would have been fit to print.

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Tuesday 28th July 2015 – I’VE HAD A BAD DAY TODAY

The alarm went off at 07:30 as usual, followed by the reminders at 07:45 and 08:00, but there was no way that I was able to leave my bed.

I ache just about everywhere – in places that I didn’t realise that I had places. I’ve come to the conclusion that I’m far too old to go crawling around under cars the way that I did. Nice and leisurely, with a cup of coffee and a couple of biscuits every hour, I can manage that and I’m quite happy to do so. But working like I did yesterday, 9.5 hours non-stop without a pause, mauling some really heavy equipment about – I’m far too old for that.

But that wasn’t the worst of it. On a reasonable car where everything is there within reach, it’s quite easy. For example, with a Ford Cortina with a Pinto engine (of which there are dozens around here) the only time that you have to lie down is to take off the bottom pulley on the crankshaft. And that is that. The rest you can do standing up. With this blasted technological marvel of the 21st Century, you need to be up on top and on your back down below at the same time with three hands each.

And I have to do it all again when I need to re-assemble it.

But I can see now how it is that the vehicle has come here to be done. It’s quite simply that no-one else will touch it. And I can understand why.

But at least I had a nice concrete pad to lie down on after our efforts last year. Imagine trying to do this lying on damp gravel.

So I eventually crawled out of bed and I sat down in my chair and that was that. I couldn’t even move to make myself some food so I’ve just been nibbling on what I could reach.

Rosemary rang me up for a chat and instead, she had 90 minutes of me venting my spleen and letting off steam. Poor Rosemary. I just hope that I feel better tomorrow. I couldn’t even think about tiling today. And this is going to annoy me. I wanted to finish my tiling before I go away but Caliburn is parked up the road while this pile of scrap is parked in my drive and so I would have to carry all of the tiles and the sacks of cement 200 metres down here. There was no way that I was going to do that today and I probably won’t feel much like doing it tomorrow either. So it’s not just losing two days of work by working on this car, it’s also losing several other days while I recover from my exertions and no-one will ever think about that. I wish that I had never offered to do it now. It’s messed up all of my plans completely.

So starving, hungry, cold and fed up, and aching just about everywhere, I’m going back to bed. I hope that I have as much excitement as I did last night when I was once more back at school in Nantwich with a mini-traveller loaded with stuff and all kinds of people trying to peer in to see what there was. And an old girlfriend of mine, Ann, putting in an appearance too. Whatever was she doing here?

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Wednesday 23rd July 2014 – IT’S 02:40 …

… and I’m still awake. Serve me right for crashing out for an hour after I finished work earlier this evening. And that’s something of a surprise as I was in bed well before midnight too.

No rain or anything to wake me up so I slept right through and after breakfast I carried on with my journey around Lac St Jean and the Saguenay Fjord.

guttering down pipe rear of houseles guis virlet puy de dome franceOutside later, I finished off the guttering.

It was too much like hard work to set up the big electric SDS drill, and so I had a good go with the bigger Ryobi Plus One drill. I was quite impressed because once I put a new battery in it, the Ryobi did the job quite well. So that enabled me to fit the brackets for the downpipe and then fit the downpipe.

It’s all now glued into position and quite solid too as you can see.

kwikstage scaffolding rear of house les guis virlet puy de dome france
With having the scaffolding in place where I want it, I put in a higher row of planks so that I can reach up along the chevron on the outer edge and I put a couple of coats of wood preservative on there and also on the end of one of the roof beams. I’ll wallop some more on there tomorrow too.

I spent a delightful hour or so tidying up the concrete hardstanding, stacking everything neatly where it should be, so now there is plenty of room to move about there too without tripping over anything.

rotten chassis sankey trailer les guis virlet puy de dome franceNext, and as it happened, the last job for today was to look at the Sankey Trailer. I ripped out the flooring and ripped out the electric wiring so that I could have a good look at the chassis.

It’s not actually as bad as I thought it was. What I’ve been mistaking for rot on the chassis is about 10 layers of flaking paint. I reckon that if I attack it with the wire brush on the angle grinder and remove all of the loose paint and the loose rust, I can get down to the bare metal. I’ve a pile of dark brown metal paint that is suitable for painting over rust so a couple of coats of that should sort out the chassis and the inside of the trailer body. For the outside I have some yellow hammerite-type paint to match Caliburn.

For the flooring, there’s all of that that we fitted on a caravan chassis all those years ago – some heavy-duty 30mm planking. That should make a really good floor for that.


Once I’ve fixed that, I can go and collect some concrete from the quarry to finish off the job here.

And we finished the day in sunshine too. Even better, there’s a bright clear sky tonight with not a cloud in sight. Is summer coming back?

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