Ta-dah! Like magic, and a lot of heavy lifting (oh my back), the concrete feature that sat in the middle of the garden is now gone!
It was a bit of an arduous process – the beginning was the hardest. Digging deep down and using a sledgehammer to remove the bricks from beneath it was tough work. There was lots of bricks. Bricks and slate and general rubble. But once there was a clear hole underneath the concrete, removing more bricks wasn’t too hard. Although it wasn’t easy work either, mind.
As it was one solid bit of concrete it didn’t actually break very easily at first. Concrete has no bend or movement what-so-ever so it breaks fairly easily, except for when it’s so solid you can’t hit it hard enough. It didn’t break until I had dug out the entire left-side from bricks and the weight of the unsupported side snapped off from the still-attached-to-the-ground side.
I forgot to photograph much from here onwards.. but once we had one side unattached we used a method of dropping the concrete from height to make it snap into smaller pieces. (This was back hurting work). So we then tried another method which consisted of one of us jumping on one side of the concrete whilst the other stood on the other side to weight it down. This worked very well indeed, and saved our backs. After more digging, the whole thing is now out of the ground!
I can’t tell you how thrilled I am by this as I feel like this part of the garden renovation has taken forever. The ground still needs levelling and there’s still all this rubble to take to the skip (oh my poor car).
Not to mention, in the time it’s taken us to remove the concrete from the ground… this has happened over the other side of the garden.
It’s weed heaven right there. I think that’s gonna be a fun job I’m saving for Grant 😉 Hopefully we can begin growing grass in just a couple of weeks! Watch this space….
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