It all started when I was chatting with one of the Mums at Amelia’s school and she happened to mention she’d bought a sail shade but it was too big for her garden. Smelling a bargain I got stuck in.
My initial thought was to just fasten it to trees and bushes with ropes. That…just…wasn’t going to work…at all. We needed posts. Massive, strong posts. We needed to bury the posts 80cm into the ground which meant we ended up needing 4.2m posts at a 10degree angle which lead to some pretty tricky [ for me ] maths.
Then I cleared the area in preparation for getting going
I put the rather expensive eye things into the posts whilst they were on the ground hoping that I wouldn’t be a complete moron and concrete them in facing the wrong way. Thankfully I didn’t.
Next I had to dig 40cm x 40cm x 80cm holes. 80cm deep is flipping deep when it’s just you and a spade. Anyway, holes dug, posts dropped in and braces made…
Finally, on a really rather warm day in September I had to mix 300kg of concrete by hand. I initially started off with one bag of aggregate and two bags of ready mix concrete. I thought this might be all I needed, but it seems I was a touch mistaken. I needed an additional 3 bags of bedding aggregate, 8 bags of 10mm limestone chippings, 4 bags of sand and 2 bags of cement.
Here’s Oliver helping remove the braces
Finally, the concrete had set and my calculations proved to be pretty accurate!
