Inside and out
On Saturday two men arrived and knocked all the plaster off our kitchen walls. I was going to say knocked hell out of my house actually and that is certainly how it felt. In a four hundred year old house you never know what you will find when you start to do any work at all. We have decided to move our kitchen from the 1980s extension where it languishes now, all stained walls and peeling melamine cupboards, to the larger, older room at the front which used to be the dairy. The room has been plastered with a mixture of lime plaster and new gypsum based plaster. The new plaster has been gently falling off ever since we arrived and we have bitten the bullet and decided to have the whole room replastered. So here we are, bags and bags of rubbish later, with the plaster off and the old stone walls revealed. The floor is made of huge slabs of slate. The walls are hugely thick too but here and there taking off the plaster has brought pieces of stone gently ...