Now looking more like a house. It's gone up about 14 inches at the eaves to give some more headroom upstairs, and the awful brickwork has been replaced with stone throughout apart from the stacks themselves. Overall, a satisfying job - though still not quite finished. It's been delightful working with a client who just wants the place 'as it was', but with mains electricity (instead of the diesel generator it had) and proper extensions rather than the timber and asbestos sheet lean-tos that had once surrounded the place. The house has been in the same family for the best part of a century but had been virtually uninhabitable for the past few years.
Inside there's still all the interior plastering to do, plus first fixes for power and water, but a corner has been turned. And, if truth be known, it's projects like this that make this job is vastly more satisfying than the other job. Not a word to the council though!
Yes but the other job brings in a regular income even when it's raining, snowing, freezing... and indeed it looks great.
ReplyDeleteYes, looks great. A lot better than that stone and brick pastiche discussed on PPUK the other day!
ReplyDeleteYou're too kind! The daft thing is that it's not that hard to do things properly, and if you explain things well enough the client usually sees the sense in what you're saying.
ReplyDeleteTo end up with the hideous pastiche you mentioned would probably have taken just as much work as to do the job as it should have been done. The only consolation is that it would seem that nothing irreversible was done - the job just needs finishing really!