When I moved to Bromyard, I was very fortunate to find a tiny, run-down little house with a sensibly sized garden. A place where I could design and build my ideal workplace and conserve my collection of old machines and tools. With the help of some amazing local tradesmen my dream leather workshop swiftly became a timber-framed reality and is now fully equipped with tools and machinery to produce almost any kind of leathergoods.
Okay, some of the machines were made in the 19th century; many of the tools are at least twice as old as me and we don't have much use for the metric system as they were all built to deal with Imperial measurements, but we get by.
Building the workshop was, in the truest sense of the word, a ‘labour of love’. I’d worked on restoring a boat for almost ten years so I wasn’t afraid of a ‘long haul’, in fact I expected it. What shocked me was the speed things happened when specialists got involved.
Before I could build the workshop I had to build a road. Actually, I had to knock down a very nasty garden wall, fell a tree, excavate literally tons of concrete pathways and shed bases just to get access to the back garden of the house. Not being entirely stupid, I found a man with a digger. Not just any man either, Dave is a bloke who understood what I wanted to achieve right from the start. He had all the experience I lacked and could cope with minimal direction and no measuring. We both agreed that it just had to look right.
In no time flat, he broke up all the old and battered concrete slabs and pushed the front garden detritus right down the end of the garden to where the workshop now stands. I had my hardcore right where I wanted it before we had a proper plan.
At this point we decided to replace the dodgy Victorian ceramic drains. Suffice to say it wasn’t a happy time and culminated in the drain jet wash bloke creating a new garden feature for me - a six foot high poop fountain. Not an experience I plan to have again. We need to move on…
The one disadvantage of the back garden was the slope. It ran downhill towards the new workshop site. When we started it was a rather neatly trimmed lawn. 2 hours later it was a building site. I wanted to create rather more than just a workplace - hey I was going to live here so Dave carefully carved out a curved trench inside which would become my new patio. He then went bonkers with the digger. A glorious road appeared almost overnight.
Fortunately the weather was very dry so the site stayed clean whilst we were excavating. The road came past the house and patio area, and swept down the slope to a parking area that we widened almost to the full width of the property. I planned to put storage sheds along one side, leaving plenty of room to park my van right outside the workshop.
Then we literally hit an unexpected bonus. At the bottom of the drive we reached sandstone bedrock. Fortunately at exactly the right level.
Having just breathed a large sigh of relief about the sandstone, the thunder crashed, lightning fizzed across the sky and the wretched rain started. Like many sudden summer storms it was like a bloomin’ monsoon and I was convinced the bottom of the garden would become a swamp. Did it heck! As the water ran down the drive it drained straight through the sandstone and left everywhere as dry as a bone. What a result!
The next few days were spent laying membrane and something grey and nasty called ‘type 1 roadstone' to create a hard drive. Then the nice man with the road roller flattened everything out and suddenly we had access to the workshop site proper - it was time for footings!
