It's been all go here, I can tell you...

Never mind that it was Saturday, that sacred day for car washing, and ignoring the fact that the remains of Hurricane Bertha were hurtling rapidly towards us bringing unknown weather....

Saturday was the day we created the great dustcloud!

Neil the sandblaster worked singlehandedly and pretty much solid for 10 hours, stopping only briefly for the odd cup of coffee. I don't know if he ate (I did offer him our homemade minestrone soup at one point, fearing he might fall off the scaffolding from hunger, but he refused merrily and carried on blasting) and if he stopped for a sneaky wee in the bushes he was amazingly quick.

It all seemed very exciting for the first few hours, until we all realised we couldn't see anything and the dust was started to creep into the 2 end rooms and the porch despite all our and the builder's best efforts to seal everything up beforehand.  I think the children may have got fed up of me screaming "Don't open that door!" whenever one of them walked in the vague direction of the downstairs loo.

Actually I think we escaped pretty well - for the first 6 hours or so we could still play in the garden as the dust blew the other way over the driveway and the carpark, and we became accustomed to the high pitched vibrating whine of the machine. Later, as Neil moved around to the front we had to batten down the hatches and stay indoors as the dustcloud swirled around the garden.

And then suddenly, it was finished!

It's weird, I was so worried about what might lie beneath - and it looks almost like it matches the 'new' porch building!

We now have what looks just like 3 inches of Lyme Regis beach on the drive...

Some pretty entertaining holes between stones leading right into the wall, which are probably already attracting the attention of birds and insects looking for a des res for the winter

Celebrations atop the scaffolding when we discover that the stone wall is, thank heavens, in a reasonable enough state to be able to be left bare stone (once raked out and repointed) so that it can breathe away happily to itself in the future

This is as far as we decided to remove along the footpath wall - the rest of the wall isn't as bad at all as the end gable, and will just need a good wire brushing to remove flaky paint before a fresh coat is applied.  Besides, now we're mortgage free, we couldn't see the point of having to remortgage to fund total sandblasting on walls which seem to be behaving themselves fine.

As always with old houses, there were some entertaining (!) discoveries as the paint came off - 1 or 2 (or even 3) random cables which don't seem to be connected to anything at all but were still attached to the wall..., 4 concrete 'lintels' which don't seem to relate to any visible former filled in window or doorway...and cement fillet topping the buttress which has curiously been applied ON TOP of the paint in the past, and then painted over! Hey ho.

So far so good.

But now the builder is starting to twitch nervously as he notices me looking longingly at the scraggy bit of wall on the other side of the porch...He's concerned that it might not be so pretty under the paint and random render here.  As we discovered when lifting L's carpet to paint his room, the old inglenook room window has a replacement concrete lintel, and the wall between the two windows may have sagged before the lintel was replaced and probably had to be patched.  Given the fact that the 'pointing' here appears to have been drawn on by someone's finger, he's likely not far wrong:

There could indeed be any sort of mess of materials under here.

Just next to this is the awful craggy render line where the old boiler house used to abut the main wall:

He persuaded me to leave it (for now - cue evil cackle of laughter), as the wall here doesn't appear to be struggling under the painted surface...and to be honest we couldn't afford it anyway!

But I might be tempted to have a go at it with a chisel when we turn our attentions to prepping the outside walls for repainting here once the mess of repointing the newly cleaned wall is finished....

Well, I'm off to carry on dust removal inside the house xxx