More stones
The retaining wall is nearly half done now. The stonemason has had to take a couple of weeks off but will be back next Tuesday and he’ll bring a mate to help him so the rest should go quite quickly.
I love the rusty orange patches in the stone, it matches the colour of the house now that it’s had more coats of stain.
And here’s a current picture of the house. The curved corner is still not done as we’ve had some issues with it. It turns out that Silvertop Ash does not like to be steam bent, the tongue cracked, there were longitudinal splits along the board and the surface was delaminating, it was very bad news!
Finally we have a solution which is to use Yellow Stringybark instead, it looks almost exactly the same but it’s denser and seems to take the steam bending well. Minor problem now is that the supplier only has 110mm boards and we need 90mm so they have to cut them down for us and just when they’ll be ready at the end of next week, the timber bender is taking two weeks holiday, arrrgh! But I am getting very used to setbacks so I’m not fussed, at least we have a solution now. For a while we thought we might have to use something other than timber and it would’ve looked shite (IMHO)!
