Honey, honey.

I mentioned a couple of posts ago that our house is now watertight and sealed for the first time since February 2011. Naturally I was a bit concerned when I saw two streaks of moisture tracking down the kid's bedroom wall:

On closer inspection, they were clearly not water - they were sort of yellow, and sticky. I started to get a bit weirded out, thinking that maybe it was an animal slowly rotting, or could it even be sap from the wood? Surely not?

Then I remembered that nearly twelve months ago, we had bees swarming around the house. I didn't think they had spent enough time here to make a hive, but...

Sure enough, when I got up the courage to taste the sticky slimy stuff... it's honey! We have honey running down our walls! Presumably when we sealed the small ceiling space, the heat has built up and now it is melting...just what we need.

DId I say finished?

Oops, when I said that we had finished painting the outside, I forgot the bit where Matt and I went up on the scaffold on Saturday and painstakingly applied paint to the edges and underneath of the window sill tiles. 

This should have really been done ages ago as they had been all messy from when we recycled the tiles back in 2010.

We also painted the small overhang where the tiles sit out from the wall, so that you can see a sharp dark line from below.

Things are starting to look nice and sharp now.

Painting, done.

The weather this week has been amazing - five days straight of sunshine and breeziness. Perfect painting weather. All week the painters have been up on the scaffolding putting coat after coat on the walls. The ultimate goal was to make the new blockwork seamless with the old. They did a good job trying, but I think we will always be able to see where the old blocks are taken over by the new:

See the transition up there? But that's okay, I think it's kind of important that some parts of the house still tell the 'story' of the earthquake.

I went up yesterday and washed all the windows (it's not very often that we get the chance), and it looked pretty sweet overall.

They also applied a line of grey paint along the edge of the roof tiles, so make them look ultra-sharp. 

 

And with that, the outside of our house is finished. The scaffolding can go away...hopefully for a long time.

Bits and Bobs

When we found the replacement blocks for our house, I was able to have a walk-through of the house which was being demolished. Never one to let an opportunity pass, I talked the foreman into removing a few bits and bobs to be recycled at our place. It is totally crazy, but houses are generally being demolished with all fittings and hardware intact. Such a waste.

So, I scored a few bronze doorstops (our ones are the spring type and are all wonky so we have at least two doorknob sized holes in our walls) and a pair of window latches. Our main bedroom window had fake ones painted dark brown. We got our builder to fit the new ones this week.

They are old and filthy, and didn't clean up well with Brasso.  We have been using the word 'patina' a lot around here lately...

Blockwork, done. Roof, done.

As of last week, our house is watertight for the first time since February 22 2011. Not a moment too soon either. The blockwork was finished and replacement tiles placed along the edges where they flew off in the earthquake. The replacement tiles are below. They are exactly the same. But were red at some point in their history.

And you can kind of tell.

So, I quickly looked into the possibility of painting the whole roof in order to cover it up....but...turns out our roof is unpaintable. And I don't mean in a there's-not-enough-time-and-it's-too-short-notice kind of way or a the-weather's-not-good-enough kind of way. I mean, no-one is willing to paint our tiles, ever.  Because the roof is too steep. Apparently, it would be far too tricky to paint them well and balance on the roof at the same time.

So we either remove all the tiles, paint them individually then re-lay them, or we leave them as they are to weather so that they will one day look the same. We are going to do the latter.

The remaining mortar/concrete has been filled in, and the outside is now ready to be prepped for painting. Hoorah!

A halt in proceedings.

Just like in an episode of Grand Designs, we woke this week to record-breaking torrential rain. So work has temporarily stopped.

Our bank has started moving a little though:

And the good old river of clay is trying hard to make a come-back:

And we have had the pleasure of discovering just how our skylights have suffered with the aftershocks:

A tidy round the edges..

The grout that forms the perimeter of our floor has degraded considerably with time and earthquakes - large chunks have been regularly popping out, and gouges of grout-less-ness (yes, that is a word, thank you) have been left in their wake. 

Last week, one of the 'men' spent the day indoors slowly chipping out the remaining grout bit by bit.

And when we came back from a night away, we found the seam had been all filled in with lovely new grout.

 

I was a bit concerned that the new stuff wouldn't fit in very well with the original, but we are both very happy with the result. 

In fact, we are pretty happy overall with all of the work so far -  things seem to be going suspiciously well.  Sadly, as I am a pessimist, I can't help but think things are going to take a turn for the worse sometime soon.