Yardies

I've blogged before about work that I've done inside my house, last time it was the kitchen and the bathroom. It's fair to say the Dizz house is in a state of unfinished-ness as the kitchen still needs a floor and a blind, and the bathroom still needs a blind, a unit for all the 'stuff' that I have and another bath mat as the duckboard that I did buy has proved very hazardous; I bump my ankle on it everyday and I usually slip and slide around all over the place when I get out of the bath on it.

But the outside of the house also needs lots of work. The house is old (built 1901) and I think it would be safe to say that some of the pointing hasn't been touched since that date! My dad would do lots of worrying frowns whenever he was around and decided last week that it was time to "dedicate some serious time" to the Dizz house. As there is no Mr Dizz, my dad is by far the next best thing and so he's my handy guy.

At 10.30 in the a.m work began in the yard. By 11.30 I was in Wickes wandering around helplessly looking for mortar, wearing my wisely chosen shorts, vest top and cheeky bunchers. As you can imagine, within minutes I had a very kindly man helping me choose the correct mortar for pointing and also placing the 3 x 12.5kg bags of the stuff on my trolley. I'm sure he'd have even brought it out to the car if I'd have asked him but I ceased being helpless once I had the goods (a girl's gotta draw the line somewhere dontcha know)

I thought now would be a good time to show you some visuals. It's a work in progress shall we say. And once it reaches some kind of finished state I'll post some pics of it looking lovely. For the moment, it's downright ugly:


This was chipped out to create the new groove for more effective draining


Dizz Dad hard at work laying the new groove


We cleverly used this to make a smooth circular groove...get us!


What a beautiful view...the yard, not Dizz Dad's bum!


This is the falling down shed


And this is the falling down wall


The other falling down wall


And finally the original toilet roll holder for the old outhouse

Gorgeous or what? The plans are that the walls will all be painted a sandstone colour, thus brightening up the place massively. The horrible brown doors will be replaced with a much nicer shade, possibly blue. And the concrete ground will also be painted but the area where I sit out and enjoy the sunshine will be some kind of paved niceness and a much more pleasant place to enjoy the many many days of sunshine we enjoy so much...

We eventually got rained off at about half 3 so whilst I've been waiting for my water to heat up I thought I'd blog my Sunday. I'm covered in brick dust. And I think I might actually smell cos it's bloody hard work doing all that scraping and wire brushing! Charming or what?

See you all soon!
xx