The Road Splay

Splay, a verb meaning slant, slope or spread outwards;

Our road splay has progressed nicely over the last week, the actual splay work onto the road is complete and now that will be taking a bit of a back seat while the work on digging into the hillside takes place.  The main thing is we were able to send back the traffic lights after only four days, much to the delight of all the hundreds of drivers and buses and cyclists that use this busy A road on a day to day basis.  With the driveway widened out-ways we can now see much further in both directions when we are trying to pull off the property

These are just a few of the many photos that Lovely Hubby took so that we have a record of what we have done.  The highways people have been round and inspected the work and it has all been passed as having been done to a very high level of workmanship.

The new slant down to the old existing drain.

And the new drain in the road that we had to install, showing the pipe that will lead directly to our water soakaway system.  This means that no rain water off our hillside will puddle on the main road like it used to.

Once the drains were in and the pipes connected the foundations for the new walls were laid ...

... on both sides.

Looking good, a nice neat job that will eventually be tarmaced right up to the road when our drive work is complete.  This concrete line had to be installed to support and protect the main road.

The wall started going up the day after the concrete had set.  Lovely Hubby was the labourer and Arthur did the bricklaying.

Both sides eventually took shape nicely.

Here you can see the square access cover (that is alongside the polytunnel) over our huge concrete soakaway rings with the pipe leading to the pipe going to the drain in the road.  It is all starting to make sense to me now, I have a very clever hubby that designed all this.

This is the round 'thing' in the middle that all the pipes converge into so that water soaks away unimpeded.

A little bit of finished stonework on the corner, the rest of the blocks will be clad in lovely dark grey Welsh stone as soon as the next lot of digging work is finished ... of course there will be pictures for you to see then!!

I apologise for this being potentially THE most boring post you have ever read, but as it is a major development on our property it's one I needed to do for the record.

To make up for it, and for all those of you who wanted to see more photos of our little holiday cottage of last weekend, I have uploaded most of the photos I took.  The are on a separate page at the top of the Blog entitled. 'Pontbrenmydyr'.

I'm off to plant some fartichokes now .... of course I mean Artichokes ... but for those of you in the know  ;-)

Sue xx