Louisa Shorney

The courtyard had been the general builders yard dump for anything we couldn’t store in the workshop. The ground was uneven and sloping, a mixture of bare earth, rubble, concrete and weeds. Having dug up patches of old concrete, I sledge hammered them into smaller usable rubble, together with any other useful hardcore lying around the garden, left overs from old building projects. I levelled off the yard leaving a slight slope for drainage and topped it all off with small chippings and course sand reclaimed from freecycle, someone else was lifting an old patio to lay lawn. Lucky me.

I’d kept my last lot of 4×4 tyres, 2 of which I used for my clematis I’d brought with me form my previous home. 1 I cut in half (not an easy task) and placed a long the wall as herb planters. Then I started to lay the stones, slabs, tiles and bits of concrete that I’d collected from various places; paving slabs from freecycle, some from around the garden, slate and stone left over from building the fireplace, the remaining floor tiles from the wet room and some good looking slabs of concrete that I’d dug up from the yard. All of these were laid in a dry mix of sand and cement and then watered in with cobble stones and pea grit to finish.