Repairs to Large Stone Wall

I have a new neighbour - not the other half of my semi-detached house but the other side.  Their house has a door onto the pavement, whereas my house is set back 15 metres, with the result that there is a wall  between my front garden and their back garden. They have done a phenomenal amount of work on their place in a very short space of time (mostly based on the right principles). One of the things they have done was to remove the huge amount of ivy on this 16" thick limestone wall which, sadly, has revealed that the wall is not in as good a condition as I thought.

The wall is of a mixed construction being partly coursed random rubble and partly roughly

squared - see photo (the bin is just there to give an idea of scale). Where it was clear of ivy (left of picture) there are mostly blocks with good pointing, which is why I thought the whole thing was in good condition; however, much of the rest is coursed random rubble. The whole is capped by 3" limestone slabs, 16" wide and about 30" long; these seem to have been set with a small slope for drainage. Now that the ivy is largely cleared (the darker area where the ladder is), it is apparent that the coursed random rubble is in pretty poor condition with loose or missing mortar, ivy penetrating the wall and loose stones in the first couple of feet down from the top.

The wall starts off pretty vertical (where it leaves the neighbours' house, out of the left side of the above picture) but moving away from the house it has a bow which means that the natural taper has become vertical on their side and a quite marked slope on mine. The top looks awful (left photo) but it's not possible to say what the original slope of the coping was; it has certainly increased a lot in places, but I don't have an clinometer so I can't measure it.

The trouble is that the wall is pretty big. My side is about 8 ft high, and their garden is probably about 3 ft lower than mine (as my garden slopes up and theirs is level throughout), so they have an 11ft wall towering over their patio. A major rebuild is definitely needed; legally I think it's their wall, but it's my ivy. Both houses are listed and in a conservation area. A like-for-like repair does not need LBC but, as it's so high, I'll find someone more experienced to do it for me, rather than do it myself as next year's project. I wouldn't want the responsibility if it fell over later.

I've had a builder look at it and his view is that the bow means that the top has moved over a foot out of true, which is a lot, and so it looks as though the neighbours and I will have a discussion about this with a view to rebuilding the top few feet sometime next spring!

The Year is half over

It seems hardly possible that we are now in the second half of the year. How time flies! How the world has changed so much in a short time! How much have I done to the house? What more will I achieve in the remainder of the year?

We've now been here for five years, and that hardly seems credible either. I first saw this house at the start of August 2010, and it immediately spoke to me. Moreover, I knew that it would speak to my other half as well - she has the vision (so often lacking in those TV property programmes!) to look past the defects and the undergrowth, and to see what a place could be. We never had any real doubt that this was the place for us, and I can still recall the evening of the day we moved in - we shared a wonderful sense of peace and satisfaction that this was OUR HOME, in every sense of the phrase (despite the boxes, mess and work still outstanding).

Back to my questions above. Firstly, I have been mentioning about the internal doors since 2012 (when I did the door from the kitchen to the new extension); in 2013 I started on the three doors in the hall (filter on "decorating" or "doors" to find these posts) These are the original doors with four recessed rectangles, the upper pair being slightly larger; the doors were covered with some revolting brown stuff which gummed up sandpaper in two strokes and was eventually removed with a three handed operation involving a hot air gun, a scraper and a Stanley knife; the knife had to be used after every stroke to remove the molten globule from the scraper, otherwise the next stroke would leave as much as it removed. I managed this by holding both the heat gun and the Stanley knife in my left hand, at the expense of a slight strain to the thumb!

Compounding the difficulty of the brown gunk, both sides of the lounge door and one side of the kitchen door have a moulding around each of the four rectangles, which made removal of the gunk even more onerous. There was also the architrave around both sides of the kitchen door - I confess that in 2015 I gave in and replaced the architrave around the lounge door (which had been split on one side in earlier works although I forget exactly how).

Anyway, I stuck at the removal task and had done the two main doors by last autumn. Remaining was the door to the cupboard under the stairs, which I did in February this year. The nice touch on this one was to add a bit of architrave above it, which has improved the look considerably. They are finished in eggshell eau-de-nil which looks really good with the gentle yellow of the claypaint walls.

Secondly, I determined that there were some jobs for which I just had to bite the bullet, namely the sash windows. I did one (the largest and most complicated!) last year, and soon I'll post a detailed report on the ones I have done this year. Once again, my choice of window was thwarted - t'other half wanted me to start with the other bedrooms, and I wanted to do the bathroom small pair at the front. Anyway, the pretty large sash in both bedrooms is now complete and they really do look better. I estimated last year that the first one took me 60 hours; both these are not quite as large and have one glazing bar less, and took me about 40 hours each.

I have also built a second wood store outside, and have tackled a few of those little jobs that one puts off, like the bit of stone on the front corner which was missing (as someone had indented a bit of wood from the gate frame into the wall! WHY?). There remains for this year the two small sash windows in the bathroom, some lime plastering around two recessed windows and a new wardrobe in the second bedroom; that will leave just two sashes for next year. Perhaps then I will have to find new ways of enjoying my retirement!

Another Year

Another year starts and so it's time to review what I've done on the house and what I intend to do this year!

I did do a couple of things not listed in the last progress update last June or the end of year update immediately below this entry:

a. The hall landing and stairs were painted in the Earthborn claypaint and look lovely - I do recommend this stuff, but to get the best result you need to roll it rather than brush it.
b. I stripped, repaired and repainted one half of the back gates - as they are from different sources they wear differently, and the one half that I had renovated in 2011 was looking quite poorly.  I think this was because it wasn't actually as dry as I thought then.

Now, in the coming year, there are a few big-ish jobs left:

1.  The big question is how many sash windows I will renovate.  My plan is to do at least the narrow pair in the bathroom, followed by the one in the hall.  That will leave one in the kitchen and two in the back bedrooms.

2. There is also some plastering to do: the window recess in the front bedroom is some of the last original plaster left, and it doesn't sound good.  Having done the window last year, it makes sense to tackle this tricky bit of work.

3.  In painting the hall I found that the plaster in the top of the hall window recess was dropping down and so needs to be re-done as well, with lime plaster.  It would make sense to do both 2 and 3 at the same time but that will make a mess in two places at the same time, and the job will want three or four coats with drying time between.

4.  The wardobe in the front bedroom needs plastering (modern stuff - it's panelled with plasterboard).

5.  I want to install a wardrobe in the second bedroom, but that means that I have to sort out a full four drawer filing cabinet and other stuff...

6.  I'd like to put fire black on some fireplaces - I've never done that before and feel that it could be messy!

7.  Then there's more decorating and other internal jobs, plus more tidying in the garden - but these all count as maintenance.

Other than those, we have a cruise holiday booked in March and we're going to a square dance convention for three days in July.  Moreover the church is not doing any major work this year as our current grant application is for 2017, so it might be a more relaxed year!

http://www.heyfordhoofers.org.uk/