I wanted to plaster the back wall of the red room this week. Well, I was going to do the joists on the other side of the room but ugh no I don’t wanna. Holding heavy stuff slightly above my head for interminable lengths of time isn’t very appealing right now. Decided to wait until Tim can help.

So plastering it is! Much easier. I pulled the wallboard off around the window because it was cracked in places and I suspected the wall underneath would need repairing.

Tim liked the idea of having exposed stone. I wasn’t keen on it – I don’t have anything against the look but it would add a ton of work and I wasn’t confident I could make a neat job of it.

Seems there was a misunderstanding because I went for it thinking I was doing what Tim wanted, but turns out he’d decided I could just keep it covered. Oh well. Spent a few hours chiselling off a facade of mortar and then scraping out slightly damp dust from between the rocks. A few hours.. on one side of the window!

A bunch of the rocks came out of course. The next day I put the rocks back in with some lime mortar.

This was the day after that. Actually it wasn’t. It was raining hard that day and I was so grumpy in the morning at the thought of mixing mortar in that rain that Tim made an executive decision and put me on the sofa for a duvet day.

So the next day after that I scraped out the middle of the window. I was puzzled by the massive gap along the bottom (photo above). I can’t find any information online about why that might exist. Could it be for air flow? If it is I’ll be leaving a bit of a gap. But apparently the stuff on the front of the rocks was basically all that kept them up because when I scraped it off a bunch of the rocks along the bottom fell off along with the dust between them.

Research can only take me so far because there are questions I have that I can’t find answers to. Going by the fact that the house is still standing when obvious bodge jobs have been done all over it, I feel ok.