Its been a while

Been a quite few months to a year :) Cannot say we had done a lot with our patch but after much huff and puff we finally got ourselves back on track.

We started initially back in the middle of last year with a chat to girl called Paula Halpin in Westport re doing a landscape plan for us.
She sat us down asked what we wanted, we told her our thoughts and she came back a week later with a full drawn, taken off our CAD drawns outline drives, lawns, garden patches, hegding, flower beds, decking, paving, kerbing etc. Cost us 150 notes but to be honest it is well worth it as we have a goal now to aim for.

Back then at the beginning of the year I finally got Sean and his lads to come in and level the place off.
There was a load of fill to go in to pull up the back of the house to the near required level before soiling.
Over the next 3 weeks they left in 30 loads of fill to rise up the back and sides of the house.

Then the decision was also made to put a boundary between myself and Sean.
The options were hedge, fence, post and rail, blocks or concrete panels.

The panels in the end were the best and quickest option, with Seans lads able to do the lot of the work we would split the costs on the 50m run.
The panel are 6ft long and 1ft high, we used min of 4 and max of 5 panels high per run. Each panel cost 13 euro each ex vat and also 13 euro per each of the concrete posts which house the panels. The panels are stone effect on one side and plain on the other.
The work itself took about 8 days to do but it was an A1 job which really changed the whole face of the site.

Next up was the front wall. We have a run of 192ft from side to side along the front of the wall. Planning had it noted that we need to have 60ft of stone frontage. I weighed it up and decided that we would use up 125ft of the side with stone faced wall.
I got Sean to put the foundations in and then we were going to block it ourselves, well we did until I was told that a lad would block the lot of it for 290 euro, which was spot on, working out about 70 cent per block.
This changed the whole frontage big time.

The next job was to find someone to do the stone. The original stone masons were no longer working so I had to search about. I got a lad who said he was a good stone mason, brought to work he did and sure enough it looked spot on. Put a price of 3900 euro on it.
So I told him to match the house, got him his bags of cement (4.35 per bag) and 10 ton of sand.
So I left him to it, was working late so it was difficult to see progress, that was until my next door neighbour asked me “Did you spot the stonework”, my answer was “Ya, it looks spot on” but when he asked me did I “really see it” I was worried.
So next day I headed out after lunch to see “the stone work”. I nearly collapsed, how should I put it, if you were to give the work to a 1 handed blind man then you may get better. So to summarise, I got shot of him and spent all one Saturday pulling the lot down with a sledge hammer. So it had to start again.

I got a number then of a lad who I gave UFH advice to for Lithuian lads, Mindy. He arrived with a portfolio of maybe 50 photos and had his tape and measured and priced. He quote me initially 4800 for the stone work and 5400 to also cap the wall.
After a little discussion we arrived at a price of 4500 to do the whole lot, including capping.
So I then got delivery of 45 bags of cement and I already had the sand. It would be 6 weeks before they were able to start.

Then one morning about 2 weeks later I got a call from Mindy to ask me if he could start tomorrow as he had been let down on the delivery of stone!!!!! I near had panic attack J I had no cement delivered and no pallets of stone, which I agreed with Mindy I would get.
So I rang Sweeneys down the Newport road to see if they could deliver and sure enough within 2 hours they had the cement landed. The lads had enough sand and stone to work away with.

So off they set. The worked from about 7am to 5pm most days, Saturdays and Sundays 1/2 days.
To watch these guys work was a joy to say the least, they would spend hours chipping and shaping, no angle grinders or con saws.
They lads were eating up the stone, I had intended to buy 2 pallets of stone at 150 euro per 2 ton pallet.
Mindy wanted 4 pallets! So I was looking at 600 spots for 8 ton of stone!

I rang www.LackenStone.ie and chatted to them there. They said they could deliver to me no bother but then asked me would I have any use for a full load? A full load is 20 tons at 950 euro cash so I decided that for 350 euro more I would get 12 ton, so no real decision. They delivered, made a drop at either side of the gate and the rest of the back.

The lads wrapped up the whole job in 2 weeks, 4 of them. The returned a week later, took down all the casing they used for the caps.
They also then proceed to chip away all waste mortar and clean down the whole wall with a mortar clearer!! Now that’s a service!!
Below is pictures I took during the site fill, the wall build and you can just spot the panels.