Y-Day draws close

This week has been unbelievably wet. We didn't visit the site yesterday because, yes, you've guessed it, it was raining. When we went up there today, we found, not surprisingly, that the flooding hasn't subsided, but we were pleasantly surprised to see that it hasn't got much worse, either, and the end of the veranda trench where we did some back-filling a couple of weeks ago has firmed up considerably. All we need is a couple of dry days, and we get we should be able to drain the trench and fill it with some of the spoil left over from the installation of the water and septic tanks. Then all we need to do is wait a few weeks for it to firm up before we can dig the rest of the holes for the veranda posts. And at that point there'll be no stopping us!

There's great excitement chez Whittaker at the moment, because the yurt is now finished, and is due to be delivered some time next week. We plan on spending next weekend putting it up, and the following weekend moving in. Once we're installed in the yurt we'll hand in our notice at the rental, and that will give us three weeks in which to complete the move. This will be useful because there will be all sorts of loose ends to tie up, such as finding somewhere to store all our furniture, building a temporary ablutions block, and organising an internet connection.

As we're going to be moving up onto the site so soon, and the next two weekends are spoken for, we decided we needed to put up the letter box today. Here are some photos.

We borrowed a post hole borer from our friends, Frank and Linda.

Once we'd removed the turf with a spade, the borer made easy work of digging the hole.

I'm very fond of our letterbox - it seems very exotic to someone who's used to letters coming through the front door!