Me and next door neighbour M are getting better at fencing. Yesterday’s achievement was another panel alongside the garden and two full panels at the bottom of our garden.

The old fence collapsed with the mildest encouragement and so it was a good job that we had all the materials to replace it. There have been a few burglaries around here recently so it’s good to be secure. Or more secure than the next, anyway.

New fence panel:

And the supplies:

Spot the obvious flaw: (we’re fixing that next weekend…)

At the bottom of the garden, a new fence grew up out of the ground (this required four posts to be concreted into big holes – no small job):

And the gate: (salvaged):

And behind the shed:

The garden getting clearer:

Coming on nicely:

Decking and table, now usable:

Butt of all the jokes – now full. (we need another!)

We have decking! Peter and Tomasz have been busy over the last three days putting up our decking – the finishing (and hopefully last major item) touch for the garden and the house. It is looking superb now.

Alarmed at the height of our decking and the lack of privacy this gives us and our neighbours next door, M (next door) and I decided to put up a new higher fence panel to protect us. Ironically spending a day getting to know each other better on building a barrier between us – but I’m sure it won’t get in our way.

We aimed to mirror the recently added fence on the other side and so our deck now is symmetrical. We bought the timber posts and featherboard separately and made a custom panel to fit the space. The old fence is exhausted and so ultimately we’ll be replacing the whole thing – one panel at a time. All in all a good day’s work.

S was on BBQ duties as well as oiling the new garden furniture – so by the end of the day we had a “changing room” style transformation of the back of our house.

Posts and holes dug on the hottest day of the year:

 

Decking goes down:

Missing some:

The garden of doom:

How to treat your Polish builders – good food, good thrones:

Working hard:

Get your missus on BBQ duty – feeding neighbours and builders:

Fencing panel newly finished:

And from M’s side:

Trellis to go up:

And from our side, already with ivy:

Nice butt:

And the beautiful dining set – neatly oiled by S:

And the twinkly lights:

And the transformation is complete from THIS:

To this:

I came across some interesting material on various topics including packaging (did you know paper bags are several times worse from a carbon-footprint perspective than oil-based plastic bags in food packaging?) and local vs road-hauled food.
One of the key issues is that:

the debate on environmental issues is moving fast but is too often guided by the need to gain marketing advantage rather than deliver genuine benefit. As a result too much effort, in both business and government, is put into doing what customers and voters expect and not enough into rigorously researched long term solutions.

Fascinating re: tomatoes… if you just ate these in season you’d only have them in August and September.

I’ve been doing some reading around about eco-living and generally doing one’s bit for the environment.

Gareth Kane defines this as:

Eco-living is the art of living your dreams while minimising your impact on the environment. To include: waste, energy, recycling, green building, transport, food, product reviews, book reviews and anything else to help readers live within ecological limits.

We’ve just pretty-much built a new house (as you can see) and there are some good eco benefits that come from simply observing the current building standards, such as:

• Double-glazing everywhere including energy efficient K-glass
• Thick layers of insulation – especially in the roof
• Boiler is a high-efficiency “System” boiler which should mean less gas used
• Dual flush, compact toilets which should mean less water usage for flushing toilets
• Recycling – a lot of our weekly rubbish gets recycled by the council here who have a pretty good scheme for paper, card, bottles, cans, metal, plastic bottles and organic waste.

However, there are also things we’ve done which probably aren’t ideal – such as using halogen lighting (which ends up using a lot of power relative to energy efficient bulbs…) and decadent large shower heads.

We have made some improvements in the garden already which will help the effort:

• Rainwater harvesting – as soon as the new deck is down, we’ll be harvesting all the rainwater off the roof for watering and gardening
• Composting – we’re already composting using a large Sankey compost bin. All the waste from the kitchen, garden and paper shredder makes it into here and should give us “soil enhancing” compost in the future
• Growing our own vegetables – as previously mentioned, we’re on with growing our own peas, beans, carrots, corriander, tomatoes, courgettes,  pumpkins, chillis and basil – to varying degrees of success. This is never going to make us sustainable but it’ll help and it also is fun to do.
• Chickens – we plan to keep 3 rescued battery hens in a coop in our garden which will produce eggs as well as being fun.
• Cycling – both S and I are cycling to work almost exclusively. In my case this is cutting down on wasted bus trips and in S’s case, more importantly, cutting down on expensive short 5 mile car rides.

Here’s a few things which are on my list to review as we try to make our house as green as possible:

• Standby power – since we use a lot of electrical items (TV, PVR, routers, wireless storage devices, shaver sockets etc etc), I’m concerned about the power they all use when “not in use”. I was particularly concerned by the shaver socket in our new bathroom which seems to be an unwelcome heat and noise source during nights which are warm enough… I have not been able to find any information so far on “eco-shaver sockets” but there must be some out there.
• Solar heating – although possibly disruptive to fit at this late stage in our building programme, I am interested by using some solar heating panels to help us heat our water etc
• Buying “local food” is important. Especially buying products which are in-season – we might sign up for one of those organic vegetable boxes etc.

I’ve been reading info at the Alternative Technology blog for interesting advice.

More to come.