Work in Progress

Evicting the snails from my extension roof has meant many weeks of climbing out of the bedroom window to collect the little critters. Every time I ventured outside I cast my eyes over the dilapidated back wall of the main building and wondered what I should do with it. Ideally remove all the rendering, but over the 200+ years the building has been changed considerably; windows added and the original window bricked up, so to reveal it would be problematic when the rest of the building is stone. The obvious answer would be to get the wall re-rendered, but I can’t afford to do that, so I started patching up the rendering, but of course it still looked a mess even when repainted as I couldn’t match up the pebble-dash finish. Also some of the earlier layers of paint had fallen off and try as I might I couldn’t remove them all to make a fresh start.

Throwing out some of my superfluous casts gave me an idea – why not stick them on the wall, make a feature of them, together with a bit of mosaic. And the louvre doors in the loft (that were on built-in wardrobes when we moved into the house) – perhaps I could cut them in half and make mock shutters? Mmmm…

So began the work in progress…

I hadn’t realised the doors weren’t identical (they were on separate cupboards originally), but that didn’t deter me!

My favourite bit of the gecko is the end of his tail – a mug handle!

this looks weird from this angle as the perspective is meant to be viewed from below

This was the most difficult piece as I had to work from a ladder and therefore couldn’t stand back to view.

All a bit of a pointless exercise as my courtyard is so small that I had to stand on a ladder to take this photo. Still, it keeps my neighbours amused!

Watch this space… !