Finally I managed to achieve the impossible: remembering – on a day where the rain wasn’t quite as stair-rod-like as it has been in recent weeks – not only to find the camera, but to recharge the batteries, and to take pictures of the house while there was (sort of) sunshine to set off the newly-lime-washed walls.

Of course, I digressed, and ended up with pictures of the toadstool (?) ring which has sprung up among the long grass further up the lane, and of the storm clouds closing in from the west, and of the sunshine which lurked about the trees despite the impending downpour, and of the tiny daughter, snuggled up against my back while wearing possibly the world’s sweetest little red velvet coat (complete with bear ears, though don’t ask me which sort of bear is red velvet and approximately 2′ 4″). But hey – digression is something of a habit after years as an arts student, so I’ll let myself off, and continue to bask in the smugness of having uploaded various pictures for posts I haven’t even written yet. That never happens.

We managed three coats of limewash before we declared for now; I think the spring will probably see us adding another two or three coats, just to be on the safe side, but at least we’re (reasonably) happy that the lime render is now weatherproofed for this winter, and, while the windows are creating miniature lakes on the windowsills each morning, the damp should begin to ease up a bit now that the walls are at least able to breath in one direction. Next summer we’re going to render the inside of the house too; the walls are currently clad in a thick layer of very damp and crumbly plaster (the nature of which will remain unclear until we take some of the wallpaper off – it could be lime, it could be gypsum), and then some deeply unpleasant wallpapering. Most of the horrendousness of the wallpaper is aesthetic, I confess, and we dealt with it in the short term by simply painting everything white, but of course that does little to solve the fact that our walls are wearing rubber gloves, effectively, instead of enjoying the breathability that cob needs. So, we’ll plaster the walls with lime, and replace the ceilings (some of which are now very tentative indeed), and paint with something nice (possibly more casein distemper, which is just lovely to use, and which, I learn from the wonders of Google, one can make oneself, should one care to travel even further down the route of knitting one’s own lentils while bathing in homemade granola).

So, from crumbling render and cracked cob walls, we move to the wondrousness of walls which are clothed in sunlight. (Just don’t get me started on the prospect of the combined appeal of a render gun, low ceilings and interior spaces; for me, the pain is still too near.)

Update

Quercus left a comment on this post saying how I hadn’t really explained how utterly miserable a task re-rendering a cob house is. You know, I think he’s right. I didn’t mention the muck – constant mud, everywhere, mixed with the sandy grit needed to make up the render, and a light dusting of sort of dried slip over most surfaces, including your arms, hair, face and ankles, despite a full-body suit of the sort used for farm inspections – and I didn’t mention the woe of passing a loaded render gun (weighing probably thirty pounds) up a scaffold tower when balanced rather precariously on an up-ended plank in order to reach as high as possible so that Quercus, himself at full stretch leaning down, didn’t fall into the waiting barrow of render perched just beneath the scaffold. I also didn’t mention the noise of the compressor, which sounds like a small lorry, running for hours on end, and pausing only to squeal in an alarming my-belt-is-going manner from time to time, just to freak its non-compressor-savvy owners out. I also didn’t mention that we’ve utterly broken our garden – we had one patch of niceness left before the rendering, where the tiny daughter and I used to sit when Quercus was doing something more fun, like, oh I don’t know, knocking the old render off the house or chainsawing wood for the winter or something, and that patch ended up being the second spot we used for mixing up the render; it’s covered in a reasonably thick layer of lime slurry, and there’s no way it’ll be turned around by the spring, I fear.

But.

Still.

We did it all ourselves (mostly Quercus), and we saved ourselves £20,000 in the process, as well as learning a hell of a lot about our cob house that we wouldn’t have known if we’d just paid someone. (To say nothing of the fact I’d be writing this from behind bars, post-necessary-bank job.)