I then got the children to try out the proportions of the garden to see how they worked. I laid out the stepping-stones to work out how many of these I would need, and the rough path they would take. Took several photos to take with us in order to remember what went where.Next we had to work out how to make the pergola, check it could be built to my design, & it would be stable enough, and then work out how long it would take to put together. Luckily David has a very mathematical brain and could work out all the angles needed to cut the wood to make a near curve. All the sleepers and wood were cut to length, and then the building started in our garden at home, and David’s sister - Fred Dibnah - who's mentioned elsewhere....came along to do some welding of the reinforcing rods to hold the frame together.
Meanwhile as well as building the pergola, I was still putting the design on paper, putting a planting & long term maintanance plan together, and various other bits and pieces to post to the BBC for their approval and info.
We then had to go in search of all the plants, wood, gravel, pots and accessories needed to finish the garden. This was extreme fun with 8 children in the summer holidays.....luckily some are old enough to fend for themselves (well they are supposed to be..)
Wood we managed to get quite locally, new timber sleepers for only £20 each, and various other thicknesses for reasonable rates. I think the pergola cost about £160.00 in total.
The reinforcing steel mesh was really cheap @ £11 a sheet from Jewsons. We also found some lovely red gravel, only to find it had been sent to them in error, but they did say we could have it......They have free delivery on orders of £100, so asked if we could have it delivered to Birmingham, and they obliged (more about this later).
Plants came from numerous garden centres in S Wales and Bristol, but try finding good plants at the end of August - it was a nightmare. Plants had been cut back, shade plants had had too much sun and were really suffering, trying to find a couple of dahlias in red proved so difficult. (We found some brilliant ones on the way back at a GS that didn't look open on the way up...)Scruffy definitely has advantages.
We spent the 2 weeks eating, sleeping and doing in preparation for the build. I'd asked David to build some benches to fit into the pergola, very cheap but quite a lot of work, they looked really good when finished. He also carved the statue with a chainsaw. It has been modified a lot, as initially it was supposed to be a broad bean, but it turned out too rude, so he carved a hole through it, but that just looked even ruder, in the end we got a really unique statue.We managed to get some lovely big pots that matched the gravel on buy one get one free.
Everything was going smoothly until we phoned up Jewsons to give them the delivery address. The manager there said that they couldn't deliver the gravel, we argued saying they'd said yes even when we queried it etc etc....but no they wouldn't change their mind. We couldn't take it ourselves and it was a local Herefordshire stone so wasn't available elsewhere.......
In desperation I emailed head office in the hope that they might have a delivery system within Jewsons that might be able to load it up to the central delivery hub, and transfer it that way, after all it was only 2 ton of gravel. I had a quick email saying they didn't have the facilities to transfer and that I shouldn't have been told they would deliver. I sent back the full force of the BBC....well mentioned that the whole design was dependant on this gravel (which it was really).From then on they bent over backwards to help get the gravel up to B'ham, even hiring a lorry to take it to the site on the Thursday, so we'd like to thank them very much.
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