The early days of my tenure seemed to be dominated by Ivy! It had been allowed to run rampant and even 18 months later I'm still battling areas of it. It is a war that I'm winning though!!
The slab for the shed base was covered in the stuff. In addition to that, there were 2 very old apple trees that had grown into each other and a hawthorn tree that was encroaching on the slab. The hawthorn could be cut back and retrained to avoid the shed, but it was obvious that one of the apple trees would need to go - even without the plans for the bike store it was clearly distressed and dying. The other needed severe retraining to allow the door to open.
So I set to with various implements of destruction and began the first of many many days of hard pruning and lopping. I later bought a chainsaw which would have seen the job done in half the time!
I finally cleared a path to the wall - it wasn't a pretty sight. This was where the ivy got serious! It had grown into the wall and then, over time, grown until it was as thick as my arm, severely damaging the structure of the wall in the process. As I stripped ivy out, the wall fell apart before my eyes.
I kind of reached a point of no return, and it was obvious I'd have to muck in and have a go at dry stone walling 🙂
It ended up as not the prettiest wall in the world but was certainly an awful lot more solid than it started. And I wasn't worried about how it looked as the shed would be in front of it.
The slab was solid but far from level and I ended up fixing various thickness battens to it before I installed the shed. I removed the old window from the outhouse while I had access. 18 months later I still haven't quite got around to bricking it up from the other side!
The shed duly turned up and putting that together was easy peasy compared to the prep work!
This was the remains of the apple tree before it subsequently got chopped down and then the root dug out.
A few weeks later, both bikes were happily ensconced in their new home.
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