A frosty, early morning walk for Jasper. It was another cold weekend but a very busy one with both of us up before 6am on Saturday. Cat left for a work reccie and I had to deliver a new bed to the house in London that I manage.
I was too busy to take any photos of the new bed, was also a nightmare of a day with everything being way more complex that it needed to be, but this is the old bed which I brought back to feed the skip.
Sunday afternoon and after a much needed lie (meaning not getting up before 5am for Cat!) in we were all back on it. My task was to remove the plaster from the wooden stairs and to mask the timber, ready for Cat and Colin to paint these walls with the new claypaint. How exciting….!!!
The wire brush is the best tool for this task as it gets the plaster out from the grain. Then it gets washed and scrubbed with a damp cloth (not wet, you mustn’t saturate old timber). I then moved down to the sitting room to carry on doing the same to the timber and stone down there.
The first of the claypaint! This is Earthborn’s St. John, a lovely cool neutral that is bright enough to lighten the stairs and landing area.
The paint needs to be added quite quickly as it soaks into the bare lime plaster very fast, so Colin is cutting in this wall and both Cat and Colin will paint the bulk of the wall with a roller. Yay, we can use a roller with claypaint! In your face, lime wash!
The claypaint is lovely and thick too, making it super easy to paint on. The lime plaster still needs to be sprayed with water before being painted, but instead of the ‘killer spray’ that we used with the lime wash, we have small hand spray bottles that give a much finer and more even spray.
Cat painting the edges of the ceiling (with a teeny tiny brush) down the side of the beams in Zanna’s bedroom. She has now caulked down the beams, filling the gaps and holes.
The beam on the landing that has been caulked and now painted.
The beam in the bathroom. This now needs painting with the ceiling paint colour.
Cat and Colin painting the claypaint on the landing wall, Colin cutting in and Cat on the roller.
Team work!
Cat is now cutting in and Colin is painting the high wall on the stairs with the roller.
Interestingly, when the wall gets sprayed with water these large circular marks appear in the plaster, obviously the directional marks from when it was applied. There are even finger print marks as well. They disappear again when it dries.
We love the colour! And it looks like we will only need 2 coats of this! Hooray!
Colin is back up the ladders, cutting in the edges.
Standard.
Cat is carefully painting the small plastered details between the main cross beam and the ceiling, where the beam was repaired with the steel plate.
The fact that we can apply the claypaint with a roller is big news, making life much easier and speeding up the whole process. Our target of moving in by March might not be so far off after all 🙂
Working into the evening. In one afternoon we have achieved more with the claypaint than in the 3 weekends that Cat spent lime washing Zanna’s bedroom. Definitely the way forward.
Hooray for clay paint! Great to see how much progress you’re making now xx
Hooray indeed! And Cat now has a 3 days off so we should be able to get a great deal done this weekend 🙂