With the front wall more or less complete, and the weather cooperating at last, it was time to hit the rendering again. I thought this would take a couple of days, with only two of us, so I figured my stretch goal for the day was to render it to head height and we’d do the high stuff later.
First batch of render seemed to bear that out – the wall sections where the cross-braces are are turning out quite messy, plus it was a corner (with bale ends making life difficult), and it took me about 20 minutes to do about 1 square metre. After a while I realised my mix wasn’t helping at all – I’d mixed this load as though it was for cobbing, and then it was on the dry side, and it was basically just not sticking to the bales.
Threw the remainder of that batch in with the next one and made it a lot wetter – ah, there we go. Put render on wall, render stays on wall, pace increases markedly.
By lunchtime we’d done the entire wall to head height, and started on the higher stuff:
After lunch we did hawk relays for the rest, rather than climb up and down ladders – dad passed each loaded hawk to me, took down the empty one and I’d throw the render on the wall. That worked nicely, and we smashed out the rest of the wall:
…other than that strip up the centre where my feature steel post/expansion joint/fancy thing needs to go.
