Category Archives: Aberdyfi

A Critical Path snafu – and why is there no rubbish tip?

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I am a big fan of Critical Path Analysis, essential in project management to track what needs to happen before something else can take place.  I did a very simple CPA chart for the very first steps towards making the house suitable for full-time rather than holiday-home living, a lot of which involves finding places to put my stuff, currently blocking up several rooms of my father’s house and his entire double garage.  This involves disposing of a lot of things out of the garage, and moving new and existing shelving units into it, creating space in the house for bigger and better shelving and extending the storage capacity of both house and garage.

So my CPA looked something like this yesterday:  before I can move in boxes of things, I need to sort out the garage, including removing all the rubbish in there, painting the walls and floor, fixing the leak in the roof, blocking the gaps between the roof and the wall and then putting up heavy duty shelving.  Amongst the stuff that needs removing are two huge chests of draws.  As there is no council or commercial dump around here since the one at Machynlleth closed, the next step was to order Gwynedd Council’s bulky goods removal service, which would also get rid of a single bed and a futon that are taking up much-needed storage and desk space.  So I went ahead and ordered the low shelving for the spare bedroom where the spare single bed currently stands, the high shelving for the main bedroom (replacing the low shelving in the bedroom that will go at the back of the garage), the desk and chair for where the futon sits and the heavy duty shelving for the right side of the garage.  Then I went on to the Gwynedd website and ordered my bulk goods removal.

My Critical Path snafu was ordering the furniture before checking out bulk waste collection dates, based on an erroneous assumption that collection of my bulky items would take place within a couple of days.  The earliest that Gwynedd can come is 9th August – 10 days away.  So all this stuff from Amazon is turning up and there will be nowhere to put any of it until the 9th!

It is going to be interesting to see how I can fulfil Gwynedd’s requirement for me to get all five objects (two chest of draws, the futon, the bed and the mattress) outside where they are “easily visible” on my own, but I dare say I’ll manage.  God help the elderly and the infirm.

Gwynedd Council’s charges a whopping £23 for 5 items, £46 for 10 items.  Southwark Council, from which I have just come, charged me £16 for 10 items just before I left.  It would be less of a shock if there was anywhere around here where I could take the stuff to dump myself, but since the council dump in Machynlleth closed down a few years ago, there has been nothing.  I drove to Dolgellau last year, where the Gwynedd website said there was a recycling centre, but that was a rather pathetic little affair, designed for local recycling of food, tins and bottles, not the disposal of bulk items like an eight-draw chest of draws, a bed base, mattress and a futon.  Someone told me that the Machynlleth tip closed because there was a problem with the contractor that operated it on behalf of the council.  Whether this is true or not I don’t know, but it would have been handy if Gwynedd had come up with a replacement local solution to disposing of household and similar items.  However, I am counting my blessings because my friend Cheryll, who lives in Gloucester, informs me that Gloucester Council charges £24 for three items, £8 for each additional item and take an eternity to arrive.

Arrival

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A rather misty and distinctly murky view across the estuary towards Ynys Las.

It is the 27th July and I have arrived.  I left my father’s house in Chester, where I had been staying for seven days following my permanent removal from London, in full sunshine.  I was in shorts and a t-shirt and summer sandals with my hair, usually twisted into a knot on the back of my head, in a perky summer pony tail.  A mile out of Llangollen and the clouds began to gather.  By the time I had reached Bala it was a uniform grey, and by the time I reached Tal-y-Llyn there was a tiresome drizzle tapping on the windscreen.  When I stopped off at the Spar in Tywyn to buy some odds and ends the skies opened and let rip, and I was more than somewhat embarrassed to find myself the only person in the shop dressed for summer.  Everyone else was sensibly attired in weather-resistant clothing and I must have looked a ghastly sight, hair plastered to my skull and dripping rainwater from every bare limb.  Typically, it stopped raining as soon as I loaded myself and my shopping into the car.

As I drove into Aberdovey, very warily out of respect to the tourist season that usually sees families and dogs throwing themselves under cars on the seafront road, it was just as I expected.  The car park wasn’t completely full but it was seriously busy, and there were a lot of people milling around in that particularly British seaside resort combination of shorts and water-proof jackets.

When I reached the house everything was grey, the opposite side of the estuary at Ynys Las only just visible.  The lawn, which was a brown scorched prairie where the grass had been burned by the nuclear generator in the sky, was mute testament to the recent high pressure front and the glorious sunshine of previous weeks.  I will have to wait for a month or so to see whether or not it recovers before I decide what to do with it.  A survey of the garden revealed that brambles and goose grass are beginning to establish themselves, with tall healthy weeds growing out of the paths, but that many of the garden shrubs are either partly or fully dead.  The deep-rooted trees, however, are enormous, and need to be seriously truncated.  Root systems really do govern what happens in this garden in a hot summer.

The garage after an initial sort-out.

The garage is such chaos, both inside and out that it is almost funny, and it is damp.  No idea where the water is coming from and that needs to be both investigated and resolved.  An awful lot of work to be done there!  One of the first tasks is to move junk and move in some of the boxes in my father’s garage – but only the weather-resistant ones!  I suspect that there will be a lot of work to get the garage fully water-tight.  It has that look about it.

The balcony, or decking, needs some work – flaking paintwork on the balustrade needs sanding down, some small patches of rotted wood need scraping out, painting with rot-killer, hardener and filler, and the whole lot needs to be repainted.  The decking itself needs sanding and weather-proofing.  On most days the view from the decking is wonderful, a joy, although the growth of the fig and bay trees has impinged on it, and that needs to be sorted out.

Lots of work to be done.  Should keep me busy to get it looking good, or at least organized, before winter sets in.