In a day and age where you can order almost any variety hot food to arrive at your door within the hour, or get next day delivery on anything from socks to craft scissors, it’s frustrating that building materials can take days or weeks to appear. Despite only having a small area of the roof left to slate, the delivery company weren’t able to get slate hooks to us in time for the weekend. So as annoying as it is, we started on a few other jobs.

For me, I spent the whole weekend focused on our foremost chimney. Having started taking the render off, I continued to chip away, clearing out the soft mortar. The bricks were in surprisingly good condition, and for the majority of the chimney repointing was enough to make it watertight again.

When it came to the top two rows, several of the bricks were loose, so I had to remove them in order to reset them in new mortar. However, having removed a few bricks, it became apparent the chimney pot itself wasn’t stood on anything other than old crumbling mortar. With Chris’s help to lift the pot down I could properly clear off all the old mortar before one again rebuilding everything.

Whilst I was busy with all this Chris used the camera we had brought to check the drainage, to inspect the chimney flue, finding it unsurprisingly full of old nesting materials, which he was luckily able to remove. He then spent a frustrating hour wrestling with the lead flashing. Unfortunately we had attached the slates before correctly installing the flashing, so he had to break several slates in order to get it in the right place.

With the roof temporarily on pause Chris was also finally able to finish the third lintle, which has been half-done for a while. With newly purchased spotlights Chris even signed himself to an evening’s repointing around the freshly finished lintel. I must admit I spend the evening curled up on the sofa with the dog…