Rebuilding.......

Been a while but maybe the time was needed. Started ripping our front patio apart 'cos the damn thing was sunken in places. You can put it down to piss-poor workmanship really. People are always quick to blame the labourers but "the rot starts at the top"! If the owner of the building company doesn't give a monkeys as long as he gets his money then why should the labourer who gets paid next to bugger-all? The problem is that the house was built on a slope & there was a fair amount of fill needed. So, they just dump enough stuff in to fill it & THEN they compact instead of doing it the right way - fill 6" to a foot, dampen & compact & so on until the right depth is reached. Result of doing it the easy way? As the soil settles the concrete slab cracks & follows it 'cos they don't put reinforcing steel in either. Mebbe not a bad thing or I would be having a suspended concrete floor.
The surface was also covered with 'Slasto' - not too sure what other people call it but it's basically coloured slate. That had to be removed first.

That's 'ol Rossi keeping an eye on me! As you can see the main  slab has collapsed completely in places. Bloody hard concrete in places - other areas as soft as butter! I started off on my Pat but decided a couple of extra hands would be a good idea. The back is NOT as strong as it used to be!

This is Willem & Flippy, 2 local piss-cats that agreed to forgo their daily piss-up to help me - for a fee, of course! They had been on the rip the night before so I got a few free tots just breathing! The work ethic improved after a few cups of strong coffee tho'.

This is as far as I got after 2 1/2 days work. As you can see, Ross was not overly impressed! This was on the Tuesday of his last week. Funny how it gets easier to talk about, isn't it? We have talked about getting another Ridgeback but - we are not sure. For a start we would always be comparing the new one to him & that would not be fair - not on the new one anyway! He was really something special.

This is just some of the crap we had to remove. The stuff at the back is the Slasto.
This is gonna be a loooong one so I guess I had better stop now before I bore the hell out of myself as well! Next installment later.....