David Owens related remarks, 2nd try

The flood did not come.

Anyway. After painting the entire house, and moving in all the furniture, I built the back area up with about a dozen 80 lb. bags of concrete. I built a flimsy mold around the cracked, concrete-mortared brick retaining wall at the back of the house, outside the kitchen, and poured about eight of the gravelly concrete tubfuls all over it. The mold finally broke, and the wall bulged out. I propped it back and waited til the concrete was almost dry, and carved out a nice dip, a sort of scoop, more a pair of lips, really, from the semi-dry wall, and then ordered tiles, and managed to mosaic the wall with this leaning-back area (if you are under four feet tall) in black, and the majority of the wall in "straw" coloured tiles.

Then I built an amateurish-looking concrete wall to the right, over the Montauk green slate tiles we got as extras with the kitchen. I laid these up on a built-up surface out back with now-cracked mortar.

Turns out you have to stuff a towel in the drain AT ALL TIMES when working with concrete and cementitious products in these ways. "Enough said."

So, I had to rip out some of the platform and concrete work I did, and tear up the tiles, in order to re-route the drainage to avoid flooding the kitchen. That nearly happened in the winter. Anyway, I put in an angled gutter pipe from the same drain-hole-punched piece of slate, over to the stairs, exhausting with a hole set into the first step. So the back-of-kitchen now drains down the stairs. The bottom of the stairs is thus more important than ever, and has to be kept swept and clean. This is a job best done on a Sunday afternoon, wearing leather work gloves and armed with a wire brush and a beer, not frenetically, at three a.m. in the morning, in the dark, in a downpour, without work gloves so that the chicken wire there punctured my hand.

All that lugging of concrete and stirring it by hand did something to my right knee. Nothing arthroscopic surgery and some rehabilitation couldn't bring back, close to normal, however.