Anyone who has ever done any DIY will know there are periods when everything just seems to slow down. You’ll be flying along feeling like you’ve hit your stride, when suddenly it’s as though someone has placed the hourglass on its side and everything stops.

This is how our second long weekend has felt. While plaster removal, and carting wheelbarrow loads of rubbish into a skip was tiring, it was at least fairly quick to make headway.

This weekend I set to work repointing walls, while Chris dug test pits in the garden to work out where our drainage issues stem from.

The majority of the mortar on the walls is still in good condition, with only the odd holes needing filling here in there. However, in some areas large cracks had formed, due to the walls having moved out. These cracks need to be cleared of loose stones, and filled with new stones of the right size. This work, while satisfying, is amazingly slow. At one point I noted I had been working on one meter of wall for two hours. Most of the hold up is finding stones of the right size, like trying to get the right jigsaw piece when someone has emptied several jigaws into one box.

For Chris the game outside was far more hide and seek than puzzle solving. In the garden several pipes take water from guttering, water flowing from surrounding fields and also from an old well, under the garden and to a soak away under the road.

Currently, blockages in the pipes cause flooding issues. Most of the water seems to run to the neighbours property, and she showed us where last year’s flood water had entered her kitchen and damaged the wooden floor. So, while the weather is good now, sorting out the drainage is still a priority.

Finding a buried pipe shouldn’t be too difficult when you know the inflow and the rough outflow. Yet, Chris’s many test pits left us more confused than before, with no pipe in test pit B despite the pipe in pits A and C heading directly towards this point. At the end of an exhausting few days of digging it was decided the rental on a mini digger really isn’t that much after all.

One thing that wasn’t moving slowly this weekend, however, was out little winged guests. Our wrens fledged, with four little fluffy balls fluttering around the house with speedy inexperienced wings. We spent quite some time catching them throughout the weekend as they disappear upstairs or into the eaves, but they seem happy and healthy none the less.