I finished all the screed, inside and out. I also built a little brick wall at the end of the dining room:
Here is the porch base, screeded, and with plinth bricks done:
With chricstmas rapidly approaching, and 11 going to be sitting around the dining table in the dining room (see first picture), I thought I might play around a little on the roof. Here is the chimney as it has been for a year or more:
I spent many a long hour cutting bricks, and gluing them together again:
Time to start building the chimney:
The basic slips are 25mm thick, with the two corbelled courses being 50mm thick. They are stuck together at the corners and stuck to the timber box with 2 part epoxy, and then pointed in the normal way. Except pointing like this is terribly long winded and tedious, with the pointing and the flaunching of the pots taking all day. The reason I am doing this work, rather than sorting the interior out ready for christmas, is that the little bit of exposed roof is leaking a little, right over the junction between the new and old part of the house. No point finishing the inside if it were to get wet every time it rained! Before I can finish the roof the chimney needs doing....hence the derail.
I'll take a better photo than this tomorrow, after I've done the tiles and lead work. I probably won't be doing the ridge until after christmas:
I've also made some progress inside. Here is some of the work in the dining room to the old back wall of the house. It is no small task lining all these openings with battens (having done the wiring first). As an aside, I have wired this room not just for its current use as a dining room, but for its potential future use as a downstairs bedroom once decrepitude dictates:
Finally, here is what a couple of tons of oak looks like: