I’ve had a strange afternoon.

As some of you may know, I’ve had an issue with rats recently. So, in an attempt to gain control of the situation, I have the traps I mentioned in yesterday’s post and today was the day we went to pick up the chicken wire.

I took the back road which was a bit of a longer drive but it was such a lovely day. We found the street and I decided to park outside a house and phone the person for more directions to their house as they all had names and not numbers. Then I spotted the house next door was the one I was looking for and a little old lady was just walking in the gate. Perfect!

I went out and said ‘hello’ and explained I was there for the wire. She said she would phone her son but couldn’t see the phone screen in the bright sunlight. She ushered me into the house and that’s when we came across who I assume to be her daughter-in-law. Turns out the little old lady has her own part of the house and by the look on the other lady’s face, I’m guessing I wasn’t meant to be indoors!

So I went out and met the angry lady’s husband who took me to a part of their garden which was downhill and that’s when I saw it…a MASSIVE pile of sort of rolled up chicken wire. I’ll admit, I panicked when I saw it.

The man said we could roll it up the hill up get it to my car. I had no gloves on and I really didn’t think it was going to work. We got to nearly the top when I said I’d go and get my son (and gloves) to negotiate the top and gate. No sooner had we come back to the house than the man said ‘here you go’ and opened the gate so we could drag this metal heap to our car.

I didn’t think it would fit in the car – we tried – I was right but I had the feeling the angry lady would have been able to use her emotions to lift it just by looking at it. So I decided we would unravel it and I would fold it rather than roll it. It wasn’t light and for some reason my right shoulder has decided to give up the ghost this week so this wasn’t an easy task. After some time, we got the thing into the car and I decided we would head straight to the allotment to drop it off.

We managed to get it onto a wheelbarrow and basically dumped it onto the plot. I will get pegs to hold it in place underneath the bins and something to cut the wire with for our next trip to the allotment. This is what it looked like in the car:

If you’re thinking, “that looks like it takes up the whole car” – you’d be correct.

Here it is on the wheelbarrow:

I don’t think that does it justice. It was HEAVY. We were very glad to be able to do this:

Please don’t get me wrong – I am very very thankful to get materials for free, especially something which I wouldn’t be able to buy myself. I was just a bit taken aback by the amount of it and the heaviness of it! If we had a smaller car, we wouldn’t have been able to take it!

Next job is to clear out where the dalek compost bins sit and sort out some way of putting some of this wire there (pegged). I’m planning on putting 2 or 3 layers down at angles so there isn’t space for rodents to get in. I’ll let you know how we get on!!