Onto the outside

There hasn't been much progress on the outside since the roof was finished. So with the inside fully plastered it is onto the outside.  The front doesn't look much different, although the tree is leafing up and making it more difficult to photograph.

From the side, the plasterers' progress becomes visible, he is up to the expansion gap with the scratch coat.

Then in the back it gets better, as the back wall of the kitchen / diner is fully rendered.

The low wall has also had a scratch coat so it is starting to look less like a building site. But it is close up that the full difference can be appreciated.  There were lots of discussions about the finish; we wanted brick, but the planners said it had to be rendered to match the rest of the house.  The result we are re-rendering  the whole house, so we can have it totally smooth.

Obviously it needs painting, but it is very tactile at the moment with a very sandcastle look to it.  I'm not sure the plasterer is as excited as us though,  he keeps looking at the section on the first floor and all the work involved. I tell him it will be worth it, but he doesn't seem as excited as us.

The selection of paving for the plant display area (patio) is also ongoing. We had thought we would use some dark grey slabs, but when the samples turned up they were much more industrial than we remembered.  So we got some different colours in the hope of one would work, or we could use all of them.

Maybe I need to put some pot plants out on them to see what they will really look like.