The “rustic charm” of the original 50 year old brickwork on our place, as well as the newly built or converted bits that have been done with reclaimed bricks and tiles, has for a long time now looked really nice to us.  The idea of how the place might look “at the end”, all rendered afresh in some suitable colour hadn’t been at the forefront of our minds – until last week that is!

The contractors started on the front of the house in the middle of April.  They worked very quickly installing the insulating tiles and just the walls all become white was a stark foretaste of what it might look like at the end.

By the end of the month the whole of the front had been insulated, the mesh fitted and rendered and painted the final colour. The final colour was decided pretty much by neighbours and other village residents.  We started off wanting white but our village friends said that was “what foreigners and mafia” painted their houses!!  So it was decided to paint it what Jane calls “Salmon Pink”.  Our good friend Tony, who is a house painter, called it “Tuscan” (??) and someone else called it “orange”.  Let us know what you would call it (and keep the comments clean please).  Anyway, we really like it!

On the back side of the house (the North wall) we had to bring forward some tasks that we had hoped could be done later.  Behind the house the water table is very high and there is a bit of a slope down to the back wall.  To protect this area (remember that the kitchen, office and master bedroom floor levels are below ground) we dug down below the original foundations and installed a waterproofing membrane.  We then backfilled against the membrane and then – about 1m out from the wall – we are installing a french drain to help direct any runoff away from the back wall. We also had to rebuild the bottom part of the original chimney – it had a bread oven originally on the inside but now that is where the wood-fired burner for the central heating will be.

We hope that the next post here will have some full width pictures of the full external finish around the house from all angles.

In these final pictures below you can see a slightly less prominent but nevertheless important part of the weatherproofing – the soffits and fascia boards around the edges of the roof.  Hopefully they will help to stop the wind getting under the rafters and lifting the tiles off the roof(s). We are very pleased how they look all varnished up (even though somebody has already said we have the poshest looking garage in the region, and that’s before it is rendered with var!)

May is going to be another exciting month as we plan to complete boundary wall (rendering and tiling), build the main gate columns and fit the wooden gates in the boundary. So watch this space!