Recent House and Garden Improvements

This year has been a busy one in terms of making improvements to the house and garden. I have to give all the credit to OH, as he has done virtually all of the work. Thankfully, he's very practical when it comes to DIY and can put his mind and hands to most things and he often prefers to do the work himself, so that he has control over the quality of the work.  In addition, it also allows him to save us a lot of money in the process.

As next doors building work was nearing completion, they were having scaffolding put up to render their exterior walls, so OH took the opportunity to get some scaffolding put up in our side return, so that he could paint the exterior of the house at the back. It probably hadn't been done in a good 12 to 15 years, since we initially renovated the house and then later had the basement renovated, so it was well overdue.

He started up on the roof where he needed to do a bit of work on a roof window and adjust some tiles that were damaged and then he worked his way from the top floor down to the the ground floor prepping and painting windows and walls as he went.

In addition, he renewed the guttering, putting larger gutters in that wouldn't block so easily, he replaced a few roof tiles making the roof watertight for the winter and re-pointed some parts of the chimneys too. 

Once that phase of the work was done, he then hired a scaffolding tower to paint the back end of the house. This part of the house isn't as high, but it needed quite a bit of work filling cracks and remedying a bit of damp to make it good. (The damp proofing is still outstanding, but will get done eventually)

This job took another week or two, so in all, it probably took him a month or more to complete the work and probably cost a thousand pounds or so all told, in materials and scaffolding costs (which aren't cheap). It would, however have cost much more than this, had he hired someone to do the work and there would be no guarantee that it would be done to his standards in these matters.

It's taken a while before I could document the finished result, as I had to wait until all the scaffolding came down and the job was fully completed.  Here's a couple of before pictures of the back of the house (these pictures are quite old, but they are quite representative and are the best I have, as I didn't take any before the work started):

Here is what the back of the house and side return looks like now:

There's still a bit of tidying up to do after all the work, but it is a vast improvement. I'm so grateful to OH for all his hard work in getting it to this point. He has completely transformed the back of the house and garden in the last two years, making it a lovely space and he has probably saved us thousands of pounds if not more. I'm now looking forward to next spring, when we can fully enjoy the lovely spaces he has created.