Yesterday I promised you "yuckiness" galore, so if you have a delicate disposition it's probably best not to look through the following photos 😉 Once again, despite the 2024 watermark, these photos were all taken in December 2022.
All the containers and the tarpaulin spread out over the floor was because the roof was leaking in various spots. Poor Shug did his best to stop the leaks (again, to give us a bit more time) but he was fighting a losing battle. No sooner had one leak been stopped, than yet another one appeared.
The mould out there was appalling...
...and was on every single surface.
We put down the tarpaulin to stop the floorboards from getting saturated.
When we first bought St Abbs we had thought that we could perhaps rescue the porch...
...but it was too far gone.
This corner is where the infamous grapevine had been planted ~ into the ground! There was a hole right through the concrete base beneath the floorboards. After Adrian had removed the vine and the sunken barrel it had been planted into, he filled the hole as best as he could with rubble and put a wooden board over the top. Of course, this didn't stop the dampness rising up from the ground below.
The window frames and sills were rotting,
a combination of leaking windows...
...and rampant condensation.
The mould covering the plasterboard had penetrated all the way through to the porch walls behind.
This was the no-longer opening side door. It had rotted along the bottom edge, so Adrian attached a piece of board to it to stop the worst of the weather from getting in. Mould soon started to appear along the new piece of board.
Naturally, the ceiling was no better than the walls!
The plasterboard had been papered over at some point, and the mould was both on top of and beneath it.
All in all, the porch was an extremely unpleasant and unhealthy place. I am extremely glad that it wasn't a "room" that we lived in, simply a passing-through area; let's face it, it would have been impossible to live in there. Shug, despite his very best efforts, being unable to stem the leaks was the straw that finally broke the camel's back. We limped through the winter of 2022/23 with the leaks, ever-increasing amounts of mould, and the whole structure getting more rickety, but we knew the time had come for the porch to be replaced.
Naturally, that didn't turn out to be quite as simple or straightforward as we had hoped 😄
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