Oh dear.   I got up in the middle of the night, towel in hand to catch a perennial drip from above our bedroom window and quickly discovered that ‘drip’ was an understatement.  It was raining inside the house…

This is now an intermittent problem above 5 different windows, depending on which way the wind is blowing.   It’s essentially down to the fact that a lot of the exterior walls need repointing.   We’d hoped to get some of this work done during the summer (see The drip drip effect – Feb 16) but I’m afraid lack of funds put paid to that.

Ed and I joke that whenever a quote comes in for a big job on the house, we can safely predict the outcome – we can’t afford it!   The cost of repointing just the east wall, including replacing a lintel, sadly didn’t prove us wrong.    I guess it’s because everything here is on such a large scale.

We did make a happy discovery recently though; it turns out our roofer can do lime pointing and he also owns his own zip tower which he can get up and down in a day, and attend to anything urgent.   This way we can keep the leaks at bay for a reasonable cost, until we can afford to do a more comprehensive job.

I think interior rain falls into the category of ‘urgent’ – so he’s coming tomorrow.