A Gardener’s Weather Diary
4. Wall demolition
The next stage involved the demolition of lots of stone walling that had surrounded our old pond filter. I wasn’t looking forward to taking down the wall at all although I would like to re-use as much of the stone as possibly re-building parts of the patio. I’ve a suspicion that once the area around the trellis and proposed location for our summerhouse is properly cleared some of the demolished wall building materials may need to be recycled into the summerhouse foundation to sort out some differences in levels.
I wasn’t sure whether a cold chisel, together with a lump and sledge hammer would be enough to tackle this job but I decided to give it a try before hiring in any demolition equipment.
The walls looked in good condition, I reckon they they were built more than twenty years ago to surround our pond filter system. This was in place before the availability of modern compact filter systems hence the reason for it taking up so much space.
At first I was a little delicate with the hammer but I soon discovered that with some fairly hefty hits with my lump hammer I was able to knock sizable chunks out of the wall. At this stage I reckoned on leaving the pillars supporting the old framework in place to be taken down once I had fathomed out how to relocate my weather station.
An afternoon’s work made some large holes in the walls, leaving the pillars supporting the old trellis framework. Space is now becoming the big problem and how to proceed in the limited space available. I want to keep the filter running for the benefit of our pond fish so the project is getting trickier all the time. We still have to decide on a type of summerhouse and just how big it should be taking into account that we do not want to lose our mature wisteria.
This is just some of the rubble after taking down part of the wall today. I’ll clean up as many of the blocks as possible for re-use as walling stone. I’m hoping that a lot of the broken blockwork can be incorporated into the foundation work for our new summerhouse. Judging by a preliminary check on the levels I might need them as fill material under the base.
I’m anticipating that the most difficult part of dismantling the old walls surrounding the filter will be the corner sections. They have steel meta-posts built in to act as secure foundations for the now defunct arbour.
The most surprising thing I’ve noticed is that the meta-posts have rotted away before the wood and frighteningly it was going to be only a matter of time before the arbour was badly damaged by gale force winds. The woodwork has remained in better condition than the metalwork, both having been left untreated since the arbour was built.
In order to get better access to the wall and column foundations the next job was to remove the old garrya root. This was another job I didn’t fancy too much, not much of a choice but to dig out the old root or try to dismantle the corner posts.
It was steady progress knocking pieces of corner down and then ensuring that the pieces wouldn’t be too large to be buried as part of the foundations to the new summerhouse.
This section of meta post buried in concrete was in pretty good condition. The column broke up into pieces which could easily be incorporated into the foundation unlike the adjacent column which broke away from the foundation in one rather large piece.
The garrya root was substantial and took a couple of hours to get out, firstly digging around the root before hacking or sawing off the root well below ground level.
Eventually after a great deal of digging, sawing and pick axing the root was out and I had some freedom to swing the sledge hammer to dismantle the corners of the arbour.
Pond Filter & Weather Station
Last of the demolition