It is Monday night, and outside there is snow falling across the fields of Devon, and quiet lies on the land like the softest of feather quilts. All around, people are sitting down to eat dinner, or watch a film on the television, or perhaps just chatting about their days while swigging down a quick sherry…

… Clearly, then, if you live in the Earthenhouse, this is the ideal time to find oneself dressed only in a sweater and tights while hanging off a ladder, at the top of one’s largest kitchen wall (a dizzy height of some thirteen height, for the pedants amongst you), wielding a water-spraying thingy.* How did I find myself in this situation, I ask. Well, it went something like this: sell house rather unexpectedly; look at houses covering half of Devon and requiring the donation of several large organs in lieu of payment; realise at least ninety per cent of said houses are insane in more than one way; decide that one aspect of house-move can be insane, but only one; purchase small cob cottage with thatched roof as ‘project’ house, and dig in for the long haul. Thus you find me, folks, surrounded by listed building applications, rootling about for such arcane objects as distempers, and generally attempting to transform what my mother-in-law described as a ‘dank little hovel’ into some semblance of the gorgeous, eco-friendly little dwelling that Quercus and I saw when we came to look at Earthenhouse way back in August of 2005.

This weekend, Quercus has been engaged in the slightly mammoth task of hurling half a ton of lime at the kitchen wall. This is one of many steps needed to sort out the persistent damp problem from which Earthenhouse suffers; cloaked in cement-based render and plastic paint for at least twenty years, the cob walls beneath are unable to breath, and have thus gone on strike – the wallpaper is the only thing holding the internal plaster in place, and most of the ceilings are headed south before too much longer, and let us move swiftly past discussion of the, er, interesting decorative effects created by mould which grows not on, but through the walls. During the replacing of the single storey lean-to which housed the kitchen and bathroom, one of the cob walls has been made an internal wall where previously a good portion of it was outside; this seemed a good time to hack off the evil render of woe and replace it with an alternative coat of goody-two-shoes lime. The harling coat, for such is the proper name for the whole chuck-it-at-the-wall-to-give-a-good-key-for-the-pretty-coat, is now done, and we’re spraying it to prevent it drying out too quickly (it’s surprising how warm the new extension is – as yet it’s completely unheated, but the heat provided by the woodburner, twenty-five feet sideways in the sitting room, seems adequate thus far, despite the current cold weather) as lime likes a slow relaxation, unlike its cement relations. Hopefully, the next couple of weeks will see us get a decent coat of lime on top, something which makes the cob look more like a wall and less like the bottom of a cow’s trough, though I will be genuinely sorry to cover it in many ways – it is a constant reminder of Devon, of the earth from which this house is built, taken from the land on which it stands. I’d quite like, were it not for the need to for the cob to breath, to fix a sheet of glass to the wall, letting you see the bare bones of this house while avoiding the constant dust caused by an unrendered cob wall. I shall settle, however, for the lime – which is a joy to work with (once you’ve got past being picky about things like, you know, retaining fingerprints and top layers of skin), and all the more to me, a would-be potter, as it’s very like working with clay – and a coat of the deeply posh Farrow & Ball distemper, preferably in a dandy shade of red.

But that’s for another day.

For now, it’s cob, lime, cob, water, cob, water, lime, and, oh, a little more lime.

Suits me.

* The tights and sweater combination isn’t strictly necessary, but somehow even I baulked at the idea of climbing up a lime-encrusted ladder while wearing a long corduroy skirt.