Time to stand back and gaze in amazement what can only be called progress. Here is the house when it was still for sale (note the for sale sign). When I used to go past, I always thought the same thing: "Pity the poor bastard who gets stuck with that house and has to figure out how to keep that awful looking area under the slanted glass from dripping and leaking all over the place. "
In this second picture, the porch, installed last year, supports the right hand end of the scaffolding. It was tricky setting the left hand sice since the planks and stretchers didn't quite go across what was left of the slanted glass part. The far left side was supported mostly by religious faith. The two chimneys were the first things to go, but this left an empty place where there should have been a gutter and necessitated rebuilding the edge of the roof a little.
By this point, Robert and I have dropped the stucco (crepi). It was that or fix it up and because of the damage from removing the chimneys and many loose and cracked places, we decided to demolish it, dig out the joints, and repoint with lime mortar and local yellow sand. This is the finish on the rest of this house and on most of the places around here that have been renovated.
Crepi is definitely out of fashion; exposed and repointed stone is in. I love all this exposed stone even if it was perhaps meant all along to be covered. The style of this house is "tout-venant" or "anything goes". Fancier houses have stones that are roughly cut straight and square and almost even follow courses. This is called appareillé. In important structures like churches they use big stones cut into regular courses. In a place like ours, lime mortar is a huge part of the structure of the building; only at the corners and the edges of the windows are the stones fitted neatly.
I wonder if the time will come when exposing cruddy stone, like sandblasting low-fired brick in Boston, or sanding wide plank floors with huge cracks, very suitable for wall-to-wall, will get really old. That time has not arrived for me.
It was tempting to leave the stone un-filled like Francis' house across the street. But in the end it seemed wise to fill in a wall that faces the slanting rain and frequent heavy fogs.
Just under the roof, it's convention to run a "genoise", old-fashioned half-cylinder roof tiles set on top of flat tiles and buttered with tons of lime mortar. We had to patch the genoise where they had chopped it out for the chimney. On fancy houses, there can be three or four rows high of these semi-circles. I had always found them rather mysterious looking but I actually cranked out a decent looking repair the first time.
Robert then came by and did his magic with the zinc gutter. He spent most of the morning running around to find special ammonia that he needed.
Next project: waterproof and tile the terrasse, a floor which also serves as the ceiling of the bathroom below.
This is a bit urgent since I jumped the gun and already installed styrofoam-backed drywall on the very ceiling....
