getting things done

  We have named this reclaimed part of the garden the King Charles III Tea Garden, in honour of our new King.
In a week of changes it felt right to give the change to our garden a relevant name. We have a plan to honour our late Queen too, but that will take a little bit of work first and it's not ready yet.
Recently I said that I was plotting the demise of Mulberry Manor. Several reasons for it. The main one being that I tended to dump all manner of junk in there. Until a week or so ago we still had Violet's play kitchen from when she was little, dolls, toys, lots of little kid paraphernalia. Then there was the small pool, a glut of inflatables for said pool, a million vases and jars, candle sticks, tiny wooden letters used for flat lays, tea pots, and anything else I would shove in there instead of either getting rid of or finding a home for.
Over the past couple of weeks I've been sorting it out and getting rid of things. By the start of this week it was totally empty, and all I had to do was knock down the ladder and the mezzanine level so that dismantling the whole thing would be simple. Easier said than done, it was HARD WORK.

It took a lot of walloping, unscrewing, force, and sawing. But I did it. And I took up the laminate flooring while I was at it. No photo from before, but after much hard work I had removed everything from inside so it was just a case of removing the roof and sides. Once the internals had been removed the little wooden building felt quite unsafe and wobbly. Truth is that for a while I'd felt as if it had been leaning forward a little, and I know the floor was giving under my weight in places when I went in there. It was old and starting to decay, it really was time to go.
Looking at this photo you could be forgiven for thinking it was perfectly fine, but in real life you could see and feel the deterioration.

When Bill came home on Friday night he set to work walloping down Mulberry Manor. This is the last photo I took of it.
We'd already booked an appointment for the dump for this morning, so we had a deadline to get things done. The house was dismantled and put into the van, this morning we took it away and left the pieces at the dump. So within about 16 hours it had been taken down and totally removed. We like to get things done.
It's sad, but it was time. Now it feels light, airy and spacious. A good place to sit and take tea or enjoy a glass of wine.

And, I'd almost forgotten but when we looked underneath we found footprints from the Young Violet. Aww! I recall getting her to plop her feet in wet cement because she did nothing but moan about it! It's been years since we last saw this.

Now we are done with our weekly visits to the dump. The garage has been decluttered as much as possible, the garden has seen the removal of two dilapidated playhouses, and we have properly decluttered and cleared out junk from inside the house too. Honestly, just Make A Start if you need to thin things out. No good to think about it, talk about it, or plan it. Just get stuck in and get on with it. We have no plans for anymore visits to the dump, anything else to thin out can go out in the weekly rubbish or recycling collections. Cannot even start to tell you how good that feels.