Outdoor work progress

  The work on the outside of the house has gone very well over the last few days, the weather has been a bit of a mix, One day hot and the next cold and windy, seven days without rain is not bad though.

All the old render removed.

The house is about two hundred years old , the walls are between two and three feet thick and made of sandstone, they are held together with clay which was dug from the bay at low tide and the finished building was rendered with lime mortar. Years later the lime render was removed and rendered with cement , this has had an effect on the clay which has dried out ,which  is a problem when you do any work on the building as it makes the smaller pieces of stone very loose. I have got to the stage where the whole wall has been pointed , I will leave it for a week before cleaning the stonework with an Air hammer and then point with a coloured mortar mix. 

All the first pointing finished

Outdoor Work.

Started the outdoor job's this week,
Continuing on from last summers job of removing render, I started  removing the render from the upper half of th house, this is no easy task as it has been up there for a very long time. Judicious use of the lump hammer and an assortment of cold chisels removes most of it, then it's down to an air hammer fitted with a with chisel. The other day when I started it was bitterly cold with persistent showers, today was completely different , a clear sky  and when the sun came round my side of the house it was decidedly hot, being a bit on the short side puts you at a disadvantage when the wall is ten feet tall, so borrowed a set of tower scaffolding from a neighbour.

 
 These jobs play havoc with your hands especially when you keep whacking them with the lump hammer.