After finding that the stone on the front of the house was in good condition, we were eager to see what the rest of it was like. We assumed that this gable end would be stone, with brick running down the centre from the chimney stack. Yesterday, I took a saw and hammer to the log store and cleared it all so that we could get to the render.
We’re planning to use this space as a downstairs toilet, although we will have the expense of adding an extra man hole on our driveway. It’s a bit of a wasted space at the moment, as we keep all our logs in the garage anyway. Hopefully it’ll look something like the plan below, but all being well, built in stone.
I spent the day taking everything down and clearing out all the timber/ coal/rubbish that had been left in there by previous occupants. As I got to the bottom of it all, I uncovered this old air vent. It would have been used when the house was first built for the original suspended flooring.
It won’t be doing anything anymore, as previous owners have already put in a concrete floor, and by doing so will have blocked the vent. So when we come to extend here we will block it up on this side and continue to work around it.
After clearing the majority of the log store, I decided to try and see what the stone was like on this end of the house. It was much harder to get off this end, maybe because it’s not as damp. We did manage to get some off though, so this is what the space looks like now.
The stone isn’t in quite as good condition as the stone on the front of the cottage, and it’s not laid so well. It looks like some of it has got damp, probably from being behind the log store. It also looks like there have been many rough repairs done in this wall. We found a lot of parts of brick that looked as if they’d been put in place to fill holes, probably before they rendered this side.
As this part of the wall will be covered when we extended, we are treating this as our test piece. If we can point this up in lime and it looks good enough, we will take the rest of it off above. As we suspected, there are also bricks running down the centre of the wall from the chimney stack. We still need to try and expose more of these to make sure they’re ok to expose. Hopefully we’ll do this at the weekend, when we get back from a few runs to the tip!
THE LITTLE STONE COTTAGE 
It looks lovely!!!!
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Oh thank you Emily, we haven’t done anything yet.. it’s got to get worse before it gets better but hopefully it’ll be amazing when it’s done!
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