Plaster Progress, and Felling a Tree using Lime Mortar

Good progress on plaster has been made this week.  The first of the skim has been applied and the results are fantastic - Jane has "never seen such smooth plaster" (although I had never really noticed her caressing plaster before!).  I've been asked to always include photos, but seriously, it is very difficult to take interesting or even comprehensible photos of grey plaster.  Trust me - it is smooooth.

For the record, we have been putting on a haired scratch coat of 3:1 (aggregate:lime) mortar, followed by a float coat of the same without hair, then a skim of lime plaster (3:2) which is sponged, followed by a thinner skim of Regency plaster (really fine stuff) which is trowelled smooth.  Pre-mixed products take one variable out of the equation, and are available from Mike Wye (www.mikewye.co.uk) who have been very helpful with advice; I thoroughly recommend them.

It was the eighth delivery of a 900kg pallet of lime mortar and plaster which caused me to tackle a job this week which I had been deferring.  There's a holly tree near our front gate which is smothered in ivy; it's a trunk about ten feet high, very top heavy and leaning towards the pavement, about 25 degrees from vertical.  The rope in the picture right shows the true vertical.  I know how to cut a tree down, but this one needed special attention because of the safety aspects of the leaning - I did NOT want it to fall the wrong way!  I have a new 10 mm nylon rope and just needed something to attach it to in the middle of the lawn.  Thinking about this in the night recently (sad, isn't it?) I realised that the answer was a one tonne pallet of lime mortar!

So, when a delivery came at 10am one day this week, it gave time in the day to tackle this vexing question.  A pair of pallets was piled in the middle of the lawn, with my rope securely attached to the centre (so that the wood could not break and let the rope pull free).  The other end of the rope was tied around the top of the tree.  Then the mortar (in 45 ten litre tubs) was unloaded from the roadside by hand as normal and loaded onto the pallets and the tension in the rope was increased by propping another pallet underneath (see photo left).  Then taking a deep breath, it was time to start sawing a slice out of the tree on the lawn side.  I chose to start about a metre up, as that seemed about right (using my Chartered Engineer's judgement), and I was quite surprised how easy it was to cut the ivy/holly.  The "melon slice" was removed, but I thought that I had only cut about a quarter of the holly.  Nevertheless, we thought we'd try to just pull on the rope before I bothered to cut the opposite side of the tree a bit higher up.  Perhaps Jaye (the spread's labourer) is stronger than he looks, because with three rhythmic pulls, there was sudden movement and the whole top came towards us and fell at our feet (photo right).

The photo of the cross-section (left) shows that, in fact, I had cut about half of the holly tree as well as the complete ivy (which was actually a greater cross-sectional area).

The additional good news is that the view of the house from the road is much improved (right), even though neither Jane nor the neighbour noticed when they walked through the gateway!