peds

I think Leylandii, and cypress trees in general, are absolutely beautiful trees when left in the middle of a big field and allowed to do their thing. I think it's downright cruel to keep in a cage like most are. This one is in the wrong place, and the longer you keep it the more expensive it will be to get rid of when the moment comes. Put it on the ground and give the sunlight to something else.

An intelligent response clearly backed by logic and reasoning, but we are dealing with the consequences of the whim and fancy of the fairer sex here, and as such, your logic and reason have no place here. She has explained the maths behind it, and it seems that with the price she paid for it, even if it takes me a good number of hours theoretically working at just below minimum wage, we'd probably still scrape through with a cheaper floor than buying brand new. Look, what's done is done, okay? We just have to live with it.

That's just anecdotal evidence and really shouldn't hold any sway in the big picture, and without concrete proof of it being a swan, who's to say what happened. Could have just been a load of ducks taped together.

Like swan attacks.

She's playing a good game of it at the moment, asking " How should I do it," "How long do you think it will it take me to do my floor," and she will inevitably knock off a few hundred pieces, but we both know that I'll be the one scraping away out in the shed until the small hours. It's fine, she excels in other areas.

I've chatted to our digger driver, he's got a riddle attachment, so I'm going to stop using elbow grease and let him pile them up in a corner when we come to pull down the walls. Not sure what I'll do with all that free time now! I know... I'll peel the bitumen off of this 120m2 of reclaimed teak floor my wife has brought me and hidden on a few pallets at the back of my shed. I'm off to invest in a few new tools later, a few chisels, shave hook, might fork out for a belt sander if one jumps out at me. I've got some space in the woodshed to stack up the clean pieces before switching back to firewood mode, as long as I can get them moved by the summer we'll be grand. I can see I'm going to get bored of scraping out the crap from deep within the tongue and groove of each piece. Ah well. Any advice? Please, God... any advice?

Well that looks complicated.

I have two addenda. Firstly, pretty much the best way to join two rope ends together for any application other than a prusik loop is with the affectionately-named European Death Knot, or the simple overhand. By the time you've tied your first half of your fisherman's, your European neighbour in the tree next door will already be on the ground enjoying a croissant. Secondly, if you expect to be in a lot of trees needing a full rope length to descend and don't want the hassle of resetting an anchor half way down, bring your throw line up with you, cinch it onto the fat end of the cambium saver and retrieve your system with that. Google "tag line rappel" for all the info you need.

Great jenga set though. Compact, smooth. Shame the box is open on one side though. STIHL GB, can I ask if you are planning to bring out a closable box for the jenga set in the future, and will this be available as a standalone purchase or will you have to buy a whole new set?

People might think I'm being soft here, but in my humble opinion, you really shouldn't be spiking up or down trees that you don't intend to put on the ground. To prevent wear and tear on the crotch that your rope is running over after removing your cambium saver, pull the rope through until both strands are the same length, and rappel on both strands using a suitable device. Descending a static rope is kinder to the cambium than a running rope. When near the ends (feel free to tie a knot in each end if you like, or just be really careful), strop on, pull your ropes, reset. Don't forget to pull your rope through the crotch you'll be using as your next anchor before bringing it all down, or you'll have to pull it through twice. Or worse, you might drop it all. Whoops!

Could quite well be an ebike, I've not inspected it closely enough. And yeah, we are flat enough around here. The steep bits don't have gardens on them. Tandem and canoe sounds like a belter of a combo. I wonder if they could fit the bike and trailer in the boat with them though... that would really give you some options.

I see a fella cycling around here towing a wee trailer just big enough for his ride-on mower and a few other garden tools. He gets around as well, I've seen him parked all over. Hats off to him. As for the sycamore, go hard or go home.

Yeah, annoyingly they only had full chisel for my size bars, but at that price, feck it. Just have to keep checking the website I guess.

Eh?

I bought a handful of rotatech chains a couple of weeks ago specifically for trimming stumps closer to the ground, and other filthy jobs.

Hang on now, there's different ways of looking at the potential for risk. The chances of being attacked (not even killed, just attacked) by a shark are roughly 1 in 900,000,000 globally, but that number drops considerably if you do things like swim around in shark-infested waters. The chances of dying from falling into a crevasse on a glacier have roughly the same figures as the potential for being attacked by a shark, but again, those numbers are flipped right over if you spend a lot of time actually walking around on a glacier. Similarly, if you spend long enough hanging out under an at-risk tree, then I'd say that 1 in half a million figure gets trimmed right down. That said, there's a forest near me right under the mountain and exposed regularly to ferocious winds made almost entirely of hollow trees, "fairy door" trees, and trees that have blown over, decided not to die, grown up again, and blown over again, mostly ash, rowan, and oak. Beautiful place, absolutely enchanting, but not the kind of place to go on a windy day. Keep the tree, don't let the kids play under it when it gets too breezy, and don't put a rope swing in it.

Very useful information, thanks very much for your insight. You've given me a load of questions for the guy we're getting in for the first groundworks. Cheers.

Dammit, why did you have to go and say something sensible like this. I guess most of my free time will now be spent stacking chunks of limestone at the end of the garden. This is part of the old, old bit of the house, it was more house-shaped at the start of the day. I'm stacking up all the blocks out of the way, next to where they'll be used. Their future is as the bottom course in a geodesic dome. The shitty bits have a future too, I'm having two 20ft containers dropped on site at some point, with a nice gap between them. Any little bits we can be bothered to scoop up, and a load of the crumbling lime plaster from the main cottage, will be spread over the space between the containers before a layer of bought in sand, then repurposed paving slabs. I had a bit of a poke around in the roof today as well, hopefully a lot of the timbers can be put to work straight away as the shipping container shed roof.

Bring back the 10p Freddo!

Jesus Christ. Different game altogether. The first thing that comes to my mind is that although this tree is quite obviously dead, it's still got enough strength to hold its own considerable weight up, and the difference that another 100kg of climber and kit makes is negligible as a percentage of the whole load, whereas a smaller, possibly even less dead tree, would be affected much more by the addition of the same weight, and it'd be absolutely suicidal to climb. So I wonder... where is the cut off point? How small a zombie tree would anyone be willing to climb? What height or tonnage would you need as a minimum before considering it? Less of an issue these days with a mewp in every shed of course.

I guess I'll just arrange a few garden chairs around it and call it a fire pit, keep a bag of marshmallows handy in case anyone gets suspicious.

You are in Ireland, right? Where do we stand legally with burning the wood that can't be salvaged? I'm not into throwing every bit of shite on the burn pile, even though we are hundreds of meters from the nearest neighbours, but I've nothing against getting rid of dry wood like that. Chatting to my boss earlier, he suggested digging a hole, burying the whole lot, and selling the spare topsoil... I'm not into that, either.

We'll be walking down the middle of those 2 options, definitely. All the unwanted metal will definitely be sold for scrap, it'll barely cover the cost of driving to the scrapyard but there you go. I'm going to be saving what I can of the plumbing and electrics, the watertank and fuse box can definitely be reused, but I'm not going to be too precious about it... most of the wiring and pipes can definitely go into the (medium sized) skip. The current toilet is going to be installed as a (private) composting toilet my shed, the bathtub is going to be sunken into the wooden deck with a lid to hide under, next to the sauna and hot tub, as a plunge pool. Guess what the hot tub is going to be made of...?

There's a few holes in the tin roof, and the bits beneath are visibly falling apart quicker than the rest. We bought the place 2 years ago, we emptied the seven-years-dead previous owners' lives into a skip (keeping and recycling whatever we could... the wardrobe is now a henhouse, the fridge is going to be an egg incubator/honey warming cabinet, the coconut matting from the mattress is lining my hanging baskets.. ), and it's crazy to see just how quickly the property continues to rot. It wouldn't be long before nature does the job for us.

Sounds exactly like what we've got up here in Sligo. It's a beautiful old building until you start looking closely at it.