Burn, baby, burn

It was too wet to continue the incineration of our erstwhile garage floor yesterday, but I made an early start this morning. Well, early for a Sunday. I had the fire going by 9.30. Took a while to get going - it required a great deal of wafting - but after a lifetime of barbecuing I'm an expert wafter, and pretty soon the fire was crackling and spitting nicely.

The remains of fire #1 had charred their way down to a two-inch layer of reddish brown ash inside the incinerator, so having thought I'd need to tip out a whole pile of ash in the end all I had to do was shake the bin around a bit until about half of it had fallen through.

What's left of the floor consists mainly of larger boards - some of them eight or ten feet long - which all need cutting down before burning. On the positive side, this makes them easier to fit inside the bin, reduces the number of dropouts and general sped the process up quite a bit. In between loading the fire and sawing more planks, I continued retrieving bricks from the sub-floor space and began deconstructing the footings which had been left behind by the demolition crew. It didn't take me long to discover that each wall had been supported by a double line of bricks, so I started a second brick stack with a slightly larger footprint than the first. By the end of today's burning session this new stack was 12 courses high, each course having 8 bricks. At this rate I'll be able to build another garden wall.

I had to call a halt to proceedings after a little over four hours. The glowing embers in the bin had reached handle level and made it almost impossible to add more wood without it falling out, or risking tipping the incinerator over. I let it burn down to the point where the chimney-lid would fit back on, and left it to do its thing. I reckon there's another day's burning left in the stack so I'll be sending off my request for good weather next weekend!