The heatwave continues

We are down a Dan this week, but up a George, who is here again helping Tom. They are cracking on with raking out all the pointing on the external walls, another very messy job, but they are outside rather than within the cool, thick walls of the house. I would not want to be working outside this week!

Not unsurprisingly, the wall below the landing window is going to need to be rebuilt. The stone has been so damaged from water ingress behind the cement pointing on the outside, that a lot of it just crumbled, and this part of wall is very thin already as it is another bay window. It will benefit from being rebuilt, this is not something that can be fixed with a few helibars!

This looks more alarming than it is. It’s actually much easier for Tom to rebuild this than try to fix it with steels.

The cement pointing has all been removed ready to be repointed in lime. The wall already looks so much better, most of these stones were so covered in cement we couldn’t see them.

Tom has moved around to the side, still he is out of the sun, just.

You can now clearly see the crack running from the top to the bottom of the wall.

George clearing up the lumps of cement that came off the walls. You can almost feel the house breathing a sigh of relief.

The large crack running down the corner at ground level, more helibars required! It is no surprise there is a crack here, you can see that these stones are barely tied together due to the (bad) way it has been put together. We think this was where they joined the newer side of the house to the old side in the 1830’s, (you can see this in the photo above this one).

The same crack on the first floor level, with a lot of helibars waiting to be grouted in.

Apparently this is the last of the orange dust monster’s mess, so Tom is washing the outside down with the jet washer. The colours in the stone are fabulous. The stone is in a better condition than we thought after being smothered in cement, so there isn’t too much repair work required here.

The orange dust monster has been here (with his pink kneeler). Underneath the plastic sheeting are our lovely old elm floorboards, thankfully well protected from the dust.

The end of the day and Tom was getting the study floor ready for the plumbing and electrics to be installed here in the morning.

Annoyingly we realised that the floor wasn’t going to be the correct height, it was 25mm too high, a big difference in this vertically challenged house. A decision was made to get some 75mm insulation in the morning, to replace the 100mm. An expensive mistake when the insulation is £50 a board, but we should be able to use these boards in phase 2 for the kitchen extension.

Tomorrow Tom and George will move to the front of the house and rake out the remaining pointing. To do this they are going to need the grape vine cut back and moved away from the wall, and the yellow jasmine bush removed (the roots are definitely going under the house so this has to go).

The grape vine has been on the house for decades, so we are keen to keep this alive. We’ve cut it as far back as we dare, so have left some leaves and a few grapes.

Unfortunately during the clean up process from the back of the house, our archaeological finds that were lined up on the wall got swept away and put in the skip. We could see a lot of them at the bottom of the skip, so Zanna got in and rescued them. A dirty, smelly task as everything gets dumped into the skip…

It took over an hour of careful digging to rescue them. It was way too hot to be in a skip.

The rescued finds!

It’s too hot for dogs. Jasper has a new 18 inch copper fan which he hasn’t moved away from all day.

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