Following the beginning of The War On Damp, this last week has been largely composed of render. Damp damp damp is the situation in the house, but we are moving steadily closer to changing that, we hope, for the better. The last of the cement render came off this week – Quercus has been using an SDS drill like it was on the way out (which in fact it did turn out to be – in just over a year, we appear to have destruction-tested the poor drill, but lovely Screwfix replaced it, free of charge, despite its being officially out of warranty, with the only proviso being that the new one hasn’t got a warranty, as it picks up where the other one left off, if that makes sense?), and the cob has gradually emerged, shaking the dust of years of cement imprisonment from its shoulders, and letting out a deep, moist breath as the sun (what little we have seen) began to warm it through in a way that not even the woodburner can manage. In under a day, the cob on the front wall, which, as a north-facing elevation, is really quite damp, had begun to change colour, moving from a dark chocolatey-brown which spoke of cake mixture and clay thrown on the potter’s wheel to a warm – drier! – orange. Funnily enough, it’s the south wall that has always tended to be the dampest, and we now see why: as the render came off, it became apparent that the repairs we’d found previously (those consisting largely of the ‘oh shit – the wall’s collapsing! Quick – shove in breeze blocks!’ approach) had been carried out on quite a wholesale footing – the first three or four feet of the whole wall has had this treatment, meaning the cob has been standing in leaky wellies, effectively, when the saying goes that it should have a good hat (i.e. a watertight roof) and a good pair of boots (i.e. plenty of drainage around its base, to ensure that the lack of damp-proof course isn’t a problem).

At the end of the week, the render is off the cob completely, and the walls continue, despite the persistently wet weather, to dry out; the hat, it seems, is good enough, even if the boots (or should that be the presence of a flasher-style raincoat?) have been a bit of a problem. I love walking down the lane towards the house at the moment – the colour of the cob looks so luscious against the verdant garden, greener than is perhaps strictly decent for the start of August thanks to the wet weather and cool temperatures, so much so that I would almost like to leave the house un-rendered, its fabric a visible reminder of the fact that it is so very much an earth house. The first coat of lime is on the extension, a pale white against the bold earthy red of the cob, and the render gun is well and truly broken in. It sometimes feels as if all we ever do is either put on a layer of something incredibly unpleasant and liquid, or hack something incredibly unpleasant and solid off. (We had cement-rendered the extension as its walls didn’t officially need to be breathable, but, on reflection, this seemed daft, given that we’re trying to do the new part of the building in a style at least sympathetic to the original house, thus Quercus, much to his delight, had to spend part of the week taking the bastard cement off, when only a few months ago he nearly killed himself putting the wretched stuff on…) Hopefully, we’re on to the bit where we only put it on now.

Four layers of render to go on the cob, and a top coat to go on the extension, and then about six or seven coats of limewash.

All we need now is some dependably dry weather. In Devon. In the summer. Ahem. Pardon me if I sound slightly disbelieving…