This is my absolute favourite tool – a real beast of a work horse. Many years ago, I mixed eight 25kg bags of concrete by hand. You may think that’s nothing and to be honest, it looked like nothing when it had filled a hole in my drive where I’d had a wall knocked down to widen the access to allow two cars to park side-by-side, but mixing it with a spade and a hose pipe was hard, hard graft.

Since then, I’ve not done such a big concreting job until relatively recently and because I knew there were a lot of “projects” in the offing, I invested £200 of my student loan last year on this beast. OK, OK, I know it’s not a Belle and therefore basically crap in the eyes of anyone who is a real builder but it cost 1/3 of the price of a Belle and I don’t need to use it every day – in the eighteen months or so since I bought it I’ve used it five times so its cost is now £40 per use. In a couple of days’ time, the investment in my own kit will have paid off compared to hiring one. Also, the other benefit of buying is that they retain their value really well - I could sell this when I have finished with it for roughly half its purchase price as long as I maintain it well.

My rationale for purchase rather than hire is this – if you hire one and then it pisses down with rain for an entire day, you’ve wasted your cash. If it’s your own, you can choose to use it when the weather and your schedule suits you. Not only that but I am, let’s face it, not the most “fit” of builders – I’m a “generously proportioned” fifty three year-old woman and making concrete is something that’s really suitable for twenty year-old men. But, as there are sadly no twenty year-old men in my world (at least none who are prepared to work for free), the job falls to me. This means I have to take the job slowly and do it at a pace that matches my age and ability. It makes it possible for me to mix huge quantities of concrete without any help – last autumn I mixed enough concrete to make a plinth 8’x4’x4” on my own in a single morning while DM was at work. (And the job was a good one!) I am extraordinarily proud of my concreting prowess all things considered.

Today my work horse has mixed three loads of concrete (three large wheelbarrow loads) that have filled in a number of holes in our crappy old concrete “patio” that were made to house electric cables and water pipes, as well as simply repairing stuff that had broken. Its final job was to build a plinth to make a smooth level path for my wheelbarrow run from the “back garden” to the “lower lawn” and on to my weed dump in our field. Now I can do the run without having to bump the wheelbarrow down four slate steps and back up three granite steps – this will make the job considerably easier and my life considerably less effort-full.

In the next couple of days, the concrete mixer is going to be pressed into more taxing use to extend our concrete patio out from the back door so that it increases the distance the dogs traverse on hard ground before entering the back door. This may seem like a “bad” thing to do from an environmental point of view but it’s definitely a good thing to do from a sanity point of view. Believe me, when we own two acres of mud for more than six months every year, the more chance the mud has to be rubbed off before the little darlings come thundering through the back door spraying mud, slobber and hair everywhere, the better. Even though the patio will only reduce one of the above, I’ll gladly take it and environmentally, only a tiny fraction of our land is concreted over. It’s going to be tremendously hard work but we should reap the reward of our labour within weeks of doing the work.