Beautiful!

A day we have been looking forward to for months, the day the scaffold comes down to reveal the front of the house and the roof. It’s all been hidden away behind the scaffold, until this morning. It rained all morning while they were taking it down but then the sky turned blue and the sun shone on our beautiful new old house.

We still have a very big hole in the low slate roof above Cat’s bedroom, the platform on the scaffolding above it has sheltered it for months, but now it has gone this room is open to the elements… Our roofers couldn’t get to this while the scaffold was there and they can’t fix it until Monday next week, so Jamie and his team spent quite a while perilously balancing on the roof fixing a plastic sheet over it. Hugely grateful to them for this, it was raining heavily too!

The garden is extraordinarily muddy today. Unfortunately the hose was left on accidentally so the mud became lethal, like an ice rink. I witnessed them slipping around as if on ice while carrying very long, very heavy scaffold poles. Somehow it didn’t end badly, thankfully.

Mitch in the midst of the mud, living the dream!

Alan taking a tea break from plastering the attic.

Charlie having a well earned cuppa. Charlie, Alan and Mitch are up against it today, they want to finish the two coats of plaster in the attic before tomorrow and it’s a very big room with a great deal of fiddly areas to plaster…

Charlie and Mitch adding the second coat of plaster on the end wall, which will hide the cables.

Jamie, still fixing the hole in the roof as the scaffold gets taken down around him.

Oops! Thankfully this is just the glass and not the new lead, and our glazier, Lee Boswell, just so happens to be coming tomorrow to fit the last of the glass in the windows, so he will replace this pane.

As the house slowly gets revealed, the sun starts to shine!

We are so pleased with how the pointing looks, it’s as if the house has had a face lift. Also, amazingly, this pane of glass didn’t get broken.

We can really see the different courses of stone now, and they vary dramatically in size.

The temporary roof cover made out of the plastic that lined the tonne box of lime plaster. This should hold for a few days and it’s only supposed to rain tomorrow… Crossing fingers.

The first coat of plaster gets a coating of watered down PVA mix before the second coat gets added. This helps the top coat to bond to the first.

Alan perfecting and smoothing the plaster on the end wall.

Charlie working on one of the awkward corners.

This is one of my favourite details in the lime plaster, the bull nose corners around the shelves that were hidden in my bedroom.

The near impossible to reach ceiling at the top of the stairwell. I found Charlie plastering this hanging off the beams in the attic, I didn’t take a photo however, as he had a massively unflattering hole in his trousers!

Still a way to go, but the roof and walls are looking very smart. Ignore the slate roof for now, that will be done in phase 2 and the windows will be glazed tomorrow.

One of the original hand blown panes of glass that we managed to save. I will scrape the paint off the edges and clean it up ready for Lee to fit tomorrow. The edges are lovely, hand nibbled to fit the window.

Jasper is SO happy to finally have the cone of shame removed. He’s been on his first long walk for ages and to celebrate he has disembowelled his duck.