Rock and patches of concrete in the patio

Well… After today’s short working session on cleaning up the patio it is now confirmed: there is quite a bit of rock and patches of old concrete that has not been reinforced and is not even level either.

It does look much better after removing quite a bit of dirt and dry plant material.

The patio has a pretty interesting element that we like to use soon. There is an old wood oven built out of bricks. It is built into a wall. I look forward to making real bread in there.

However before we can even think about lighting up a fire in there we do need to address a huge fire hazard. The wall with the oven is shared with what was a chicken coop and it doesn’t look good. The picture shows the back wall of the chicken coop. The oven is somewhere in there. We do need to remove all that. Or at very least all the potential flamable material. In the long run the whole chicken coop needs to go so that we don’t have this narrow space which only fills with dirt and probably also attracts all kinds of unwanted critters.

And then there is this other wall… The patio used to be a gathering place for pigs. Behind the wall is a loading ramp so that the pigs can walk onto a truck.

There is the idea of putting a reinforced concrete floor in so that the patio can be maintained clean easily. Maybe in the future we might even put in some nice tiles. Or even go as far as the famous patios of Cordoba. We will see.

The challenge with removing that wall and ramp is that as of right now we don’t have any equipment but only hand tools and our bare hands. I don’t want to embark on an old fashioned journey of tearing down the wall with a sledgehammer and then move the rubble by hand …

The lack of equipment like a tractor with front loader is going to be a major drawback. We will address that soon but in the meantime I need to find ways to get something going whatever is possible without and still provides some value. Like in the MVP concept.

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14 Oct 2017

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