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 |
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
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