I’m kicking myself for not taking a photo of this wall when I was ready to patch it up. So much of it crumbled away, leaving a large hole at bottom and top left, large chunks out of the window edges and the whole bit above the window just fell off. Not to mention big holes wherever a nail had been, a lot of it was crumbly. The window sill is gone now too, it’s basically rubble under that.

So I took a couple of days to try and peel off the paint without disturbing it too much and scratched away at the concrete underneath to get it ready to patch up. A man at the builder’s merchant who used to be a plasterer advised me to cover the lead paint with PVA, apparently it helps to keep it from being airborne dust.

I started covering it with concrete today. I’ll plaster over it, but it is super wonky. It’s really hard to get straight lines when there are such large differences in depth.

Again, I’m not bothering to do it neatly directly around the window because they’ll be replaced (hopefully soon!) The skirting boards will be interesting work on this wall, there is nearly an inch difference in depth between the left corner and under the window. I’ll try to even it out but my priority is covering the lead paint. We’re moving in a couple of weeks and we were planning on doing other things!

I’m so proud of this bit above the window. As you’d expect, concrete likes to just fall off when applied to the underside of whatever. It was slow going but I got it eventually, even if the left wall comes out further into the room by about an inch! I’m not too concerned about things like that and Tim actually likes it. He never wanted a cookie cutter house.

So yeh, long post but it’s been a long few days ?