![](\"\/helen\/blog\/images\/daily_3\/2112_rocks.jpg\")
\nOne of our neighbours, two houses away, is a builder. He and his family moved in a couple of years ago and since then he’s transformed his house and garden so that it is barely recognizable. The facade of the house, which used to be dark brick, is now white plaster. Most of the ground in front of the house, which used to be grass, is now paved. I don’t know what he’s been doing behind the house, but there’s nearly always something going on.<\/p>\n
His latest project involves removing a lot of rock. I guess he’s probably flattening out some part of the garden – the area around here is all rocky and hilly, and quite a lot of people seem to prefer flat gardens. (The garden of another of our neighbours is effectively a sunken den: a lot of earth and rock has been removed to make it as flat as possible, but of course they cannot do anything about the plots next to them, so part of their garden is now surrounded by steep rock walls.)<\/p>\n
Last week he was blowing things up. Well, possibly not he himself, but there were explosions going on in the direction of his yard. When construction workers blow things up in Sweden, there’s a warning signal first (a series of short beeps for a minute or two), then a big bang, and then a longer beep to signal that they’re done. Those signals are a pretty good idea because otherwise I would probably have called the police upon hearing explosions in my neighbourhood.<\/p>\n
This week he is removing the rock he blew up last week. He scoops up a pile of rock in a wheel loader, drives it to a large skip that stands in the crossing between us, and dumps it in the skip.<\/p>\n
And it makes the most god-awful racket you can imagine. Picture a literal tonne of rock, if not more, hitting the metal bottom of a skip, and the sound then resonating through that skip, right outside the window of my bedroom-cum-office.<\/p>\n
It’s not so much the loudness of it that bothers me – passing a jackhammer working in a street can be much louder – but the way it comes with no warning and just booms through the house, almost making me jump in my seat.<\/p>\n
He’s been at it all day, at intervals. Sometimes an hour passes between two dumps, sometimes five or ten minutes. I hope he doesn’t have much more left.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
One of our neighbours, two houses away, is a builder. He and his family moved in a couple of years ago and since then he’s transformed his house and garden so that it is barely recognizable. The facade of the house, which used to be dark brick, is now white plaster. Most of the ground […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18,774,768],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13727","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-dailies","category-neighbourhood","category-photography-2"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13727","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13727"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13727\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13734,"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13727\/revisions\/13734"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13727"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13727"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13727"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}