After all our renovations, the last thing we want is for walls to come tumbling down.  But, there was one wall that was really annoying me.  It was a cinder block wall on the southeast corner of the spring house ruins.  It wasn’t so bad during the summer, covered in vines and weeds; but once we started clearing the meadow and cutting/shredding more of the ubiquitous brambles and briars – the wall started to stick out like a sore thumb.

 I’d been eyeing that wall since we first looked at this house.  The cinder blocks were a blot on the landscape and an impediment to the natural flow of the spring.  Chris took a sledge hammer to it.  I’d like to say it tumbled into individual cinder blocks with one hard hit.  That’s not exactly how it happened.  Over the course of a couple of days, armed with a metal wedge and the sledge, he chipped away, chipped away, chipped away.  Good practice if he ever needs to chip his way out of jail!  Some cinder blocks broke into pieces, others stayed whole.  We used the broken pieces for fill; the whole ones are up in the “bone yard” where we keep odds and ends of things we’ve found on the property (old metal fence posts, old bricks, etc.), just in case we ever need a cinder block or two.

 Once the cinder blocks were out of the way, we found old pieces of galvanized metal that may have been the roof of the spring house at one time.  That was another project to dig them out.  With the cinder block wall and the galvanized metal gone, the spring now flows more directly into the stream rather than making a boggy mess.  Now we’re left with the next step of the project — hauling out all the rocks that have collapsed into the inside of the spring house.  We’ll pile them up to the side and wait for that day when we can rebuild the spring house to its original beauty.  I found a picture of what I want it to look like…someday.