Extreme makeovers v1

A crisp and dull November morning, just back from dropping Kepler off at school, when what should I see arrive in front of our house...

Now, you don't have to be a genius to see what's going on here. Two white panel vans? Tinted glass? I've watched enough x-files episodes, and read enough of the recent political press, to know that obviously the government is onto me. The jig is up. They've clued into my subversive antics, and have therefore dispatched agents to have me officially dealt with, disappeared, an alien abduction, as it were.

Even as I sit here typing, I know that these are my final frantic minutes, my last opportunity to tell you, my dear readers and my only immediate outlet, the shocking truth I have discovered, before it is too late, before I am gone, and silenced forever. Here goes:

Oh, wait.... no... sorry, my mistake. It's not the French government. Or the US government (which seems to be kidnapping people with apparent impunity in Europe these days). No, it's Nicolas, the stonemason. After weeks of waiting for his very proficient and therefore very in-demand services, our house is about to undergo a massive exterior makeover. It's really so exciting.

Here's the before picture:

Voici the southern face of our house. You can see a bit of history in the picture: the portion rendered in grey is what we assume to be the original house, four widows and a big garage door. The newer portion of the house was added later, the upper floor of which was unfortunately rendered in pinkish yuk (there really ought to be a crayola color by that name).

What Nicolas aims to do is first chip off all that old render, and then repoint all the stone, unifying the house's past and present, and making it trim and ship-shape, at least from an exterior standpoint. We also have colonies of bees living in the old crumbling grout, which insects will soon find themselves either locked out of their homes or else entombed, Cask of Amontillado style.

This job will take weeks, and will continue around to the front facade later in the game. But slowly, slowly. And it begins, of course, with a scaffold.

And, as well, the work of chipping off all that render necessarily involves closing our shutters for a while. Oh, well. It was a crisp and dull November morning anyway.

After several hours of chipping away with their electric mini-jack-hammers and grinders, Nicolas and his son had revealed a big piece of the side of the house in stone. And some interesting details.

The lintel over the garage door was a bigger, more beautiful piece of wood than we had thought, with a pleasing arch cut into it. It's hard to see in the picture because of all the grout and gunk, but the stones in the old part of the house are smaller than in the front portion, which isn't a huge surprise. And there are some big blocks of stone below each of the windows, to support the window frames.

But it was rainy, and getting dark earlier than usual as a result, and five o'clock anyway, so Nicolas and his son left for the day. Tomorrow they'll beging shipping and grinding anew, and then comes the sand- and water-blasting phase. I can't wait.