Four Barnet GoodGymers braved a chilly winter breeze to help Maria with gardening, weeding and general tidying up of her back garden. Fiona, Jody, Rupesh and I arrived having run varying distances and eager to get to work to help out. Maria showed us the back garden and the tasks that needed doing. It’s a lovely space which just needed a bit of a tidy up and light weeding. Fiona and Jody got to work sweeping the leaves and moving bags of soil, while Rupesh and I successfully moved a large ladder to a new storage space where it would be out of the way. We then tackled dismantling a large steel frame in the middle of the yard. Rupesh and Jody had a bit of success with removing two of the steel poles, but overall the frame got the better of us and despite our best efforts we just couldn’t find a way to loosen the badly worn screws in order to dismantle the rest of the structure. We were disappointed not to be able to help more, but we didn’t have the right tools for the job. Oh well, we didn’t dwell on that too long, and quickly looked for more to do. We finished up the weeding and tried to tackle one last task. The battery of the smoke alarm inside needed replacing and was making a regular, rather shrill beeping sound. We had no luck trying to remove the cover by following the instructions on it, and even tried a youtube video for tips. Armed with the best suited screw driver we could find we tried and tried to get the cover off but to no avail. Although we would’ve loved to help more with the frame outside and smoke alarm battery inside, Maria was very grateful for all our effort and was impressed by the amount of tidying we did in a short space of time outside.