In which we got plastered

FROM THE ARCHIVES

All of this originally happened in November and December 2016

Having prepped the attic with insulating panels, we booked the PlasLime¹ plasterers – proper lovely chaps they were too – and they proceeded to put the scratch layer of lime plaster on the walls and ceiling in the attic.

Joe and I are feeling quite smug because John, the master plasterer, kept saying what a beautiful job we’d done of the insulation and gap filling. Here’s what the attic looked like on Saturday morning – it’s already taking shape, and it’s certainly more echoey now.

We had some good hollow booming voices going on.

This is the gable end that adjoins the stone part of the house. They’ve put an extra layer of plaster on that centre panel because the brickwork was a bit of a mess where the chimney goes up the wall. So they’ve built it out to tidy it up.

There’s still daylight under that tape, but not for much longer!

The plasterers are using special insulating lime plaster, which is not as good as using proper insulation, but is much better than just plastering onto a single skin brick wall. It’s a decent compromise to keep the timbers on display, but not freeze to death in winter.

I guess we shall see!

And the guys have tidied the windows up – which makes a big difference:

It already looks absolutely fab. I was beginning to doubt whether we’d really end up with a lovely room, but we totally will.

I’ll update in a moment but I just needed to show you our living room, which had become a serial killer’s kill room. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen Dexter…

Creepy.

But surprisingly effective at keeping the worst of the chill out of my office.

Two weeks later

The attic looks absolutely stunning. These photos don’t really do it justice tbh.

We’re going to leave it for a few months – before we paint it. Advice was to leave it a year, but my level of impatience is too high for that, so we’re compromising at 8 months.

We’ll be using clay-based paint designed to go onto lime plaster, so there’ll probably be lots of indecision about which colours we like and how we can’t decide.

Next job in the attic is to finish sanding and oiling the timbers. We need to lightly sand all the timbers, in fact, to take the plaster off.

Then we’ll be putting in the electrics. Yes, yes, we should have done all that before the plasterers arrived but things got on top of us and we got overexcited about the plastering.

Next: getting the window in the wonky room knocked back in and the 8″x8″ beams installed to reinforce the attic floor.

1  We got John and his team from PlasLime to come and do the work, and they were brilliant. A total delight to have around the place, and really careful about keeping everything as clean and tidy as possible. We were pleasantly surprised at how little dust there was. The bill was huge… but it was totally worth it. Beans on toast until springtime.