Iron man

We received an unexpected but super exciting call early last week.

‘The railings are complete, can he come on Friday to fit them?’

‘Yes, of course’ I stuttered. I couldn’t wait to get off the phone and let Brian know. We had scheduled to have the pool opened in May, and ideally wanted this job completed before then to make access to the swimming pool safer, so having them delivered and fitted this week was brilliant.

The blacksmith arrived early on Friday morning and, with the help of Brian, had soon unloaded the pieces he had prebuilt and was fitting them to the steps. However it was not all easy, there was a lot of tweaking that needed to be done to make them fit the very old stone steps.

The steps are very higgledy-piggledy, and a few were too high, so needed some cuts made in them, and one of the support beams needed some adjustments to secure it firmly into the stonework.

After a lot of levelling and minor adjustments they were ready to fix the final 3 uprights which had been left until they were sure everything was straight and level.

But before that he was going to hang the gate. The two cast iron panels which we had bought at a vide grenier had been joined together within a frame to make the gate, but it was now extremely heavy. The three of us struggled to lift the gate to the top of the stairs but we did get there, and soon the hinges were being screwed into the stone pillars to support it.

The gate was in place and fitted perfectly. Now the small detail of the lock.

It was getting late in the day, so we decided to pick it all up again early Saturday morning.