Hillfoot House

After what feels like an eternity of endurance of dirt and dust, we have reached a halt in the building works, thank goodness. It began in October when the scaffolding went up, a skip arrived and a portaloo was installed; then the roof and the gable wall were the first priority. The roof at the front of the house had no insulation or lining, and so the roofers took off all the tiles and stacked them up. Then they cut slabs of insulating foam to fit between the rafters, then they laid a weatherproof membrane over that, held it down with battens and finally put the tiles back, replacing a few damaged ones with similar, reclaimed tiles.

Here is the roof when it was exposed:

You can see the curve of the oak rafters, which were so solid that the roofers said they were finding that they were having difficulty in hammering in their nails. You can also see the foam slabs of insulation in the middle of the roof. I imagine that on most houses, the rafters are pine and are spaced at industry agreed intervals, so the slabs of insulation just slot in neatly. In our case it was more like a jigsaw puzzle!

Meanwhile we had a lovely chap Paul who was working on the gable wall. There were some damaged bricks which needed to be repaired, and in most cases he was able to turn them round, putting the damaged part to the inside of the wall. The grouting was weather damaged and there was some general staining to the bricks, caused by wind and rain and passing traffic. So Paul regrouped and cleaned the bricks, and now the wall looks fantastic.

While the roof was being worked on, Paul replaced the chimney pots and put “witches hats” on them, and did the same amazing work on the chimneys, regrouting and repairing damage. Of all the work, this was the part that left us open mouthed in amazement, and the difference is very visible.

Other changes were that the cracked lintel above the study side door was repaired, which seemed to be much easier to do than you might have expected. At any rate it was fixed in a day, though the result was also a lot of damage to the plaster indoors, and the plasterers had to make that good and then the paint had to be reapplied. Again, this didn’t take very long.

Lastly, the outer paintwork was all repainted, and damaged wood and guttering replaced where necessary. That isn’t yet finished, and the builders will be back in January to complete that work. We also have some drainage problems to sort out at the back of the house, and other things have become apparent. For example, we will need to have the chimneys lined now: the banging on the gable wall has loosened some of the dried out mortar inside the chimneys (we had to pick bits of brick out of the fireplaces!) and the smell of smoke is much clearer in rooms where they are above or next to a fire that has been lit. We need to have the dormer windows insulated on the inside, too: the repairs to the lead and the outside have left massive cracks in the plaster on the inside, so while we are repairing that we are going to use insulating board there. But it is all looking so lovely now: and we were phenomenally lucky that the weather stayed dry and not too windy while the work was underway.