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.
An iron ring bolted into the stone surround of the old kitchen fireplace
After a day’s work half the fire-place is open, the carpet’s gone and the partition wall is out – which is adding loads of light and space.
The table came from the workshop – it’s ends had been cruelly sawn off to fit the space. It’s probably the original kitchen table so our plan is to restore it and use it again if we can.
The unassembled bit of furniture against the back wall is an old butler’s pantry that I picked up in a salvage yard earlier this year. It came out of a georgian house in Glasgow and like the table needs some tlc. It was the handles that sealed the deal…
A Castle in the Sky 