Pointing

Now luckily I have managed to avoid doing the pointing so far as it was part of the build cost, but there were a few walls that needed seeing to.


First I had to knock out all the old lime mortar from the inside wall in the cottage, along with various iron nails and wedges. There was also a spark plug???? perhaps I should get Tony Robinson and his Time Team in to investigate.

We've decided not to use lime mortar on this renovation, whilst it is intrinsically more environmentally friendly, if we had gone down that route the price of the job would have almost doubled and would have made the whole project a non starter. We decided to make the cottages as green as possible in terms of their energy usage, and where possible use more sympathetic products such as green paint (thats paint with no nasties in it rather than the colour).

Back to the pointing, I made up a batch of mortar (5:1 if your interested), and started slapping it in the gaps. Now pointing is a messy job, and whilst I now it's not a good idea to have prolonged contact on your skin, but after 10 minutes of throwing most of it on the floor, I started shoving it in the gaps with my hands.


Things were going very well and I finally finished by 4.00pm, my hands were feeling a bit sore, but on washing them I was shocked to find that someone had swapped my ones for those of a 94 year old Tibetan goat herders'. They had also cracked open and the cement was eating into them.

Anyway, luckily phil had made me buy some "mans" hand cream which Norwegian fishermen use apparently. I didn't need to rub it in, just put my hands near the open bottle and they just sucked it out!