Thank you Mother Nature

Hip hip Hurray!  George was able to get the harling done as the weather was kind 😊

It looked quite dark compared to the paint on the house walls...

...but George assured us that it would dry to a much lighter shade, so we decided to wait and see.  If we didn't like the contrast, then we would paint it the same colour as the house walls.

Of course, he was quite right 😉

The harling is indeed a very similar shade to the house walls, so we've been happy to leave it be.

George also harled the wall running alongside the front path and filled in the drainage gaps with the loose leftovers, which were to be topped off with stone chips to match the rest in the garden in due course.

As I mentioned previously it just wasn't going to be possible to exactly replicate the original harling on the house; it was done such a long time ago and there have been many coats of paint added over the years.  In the end we decided that this was the best way forward, to simply harl the new porch and not even try to make it seem part of the original house finish.  We were glad, though, that we made the decision to keep it to the same width as the old porch.  I'm sure that if we'd had to have large sections of the main body of the house newly harled, then that would have been blindingly obvious.

During this time work was also going on inside the porch such as the electrics, etc, but for some reason I took hardly any photos of that 😕 The door, by the way, arrived with the wrong lower panel but eventually the right replacement turned up and it's all fine now 😊 

It was a very long process to get this far but by the end of October the bulk of the exterior was complete, just the railings to go.  I was terrified that someone would manage to trip over the edge and hurt themselves, so that's why I put those plant pots there.  I figured that at least folk would see them on their way up the path, and it might make them a bit more cautious ~ I was also very happy when we got the exterior sensor light fitted for much the same reason!

By the way, just to give you a heads up that we have friends from down south coming up for a holiday with us today, which I'm super excited about 👏 I will most likely be MIA for the next week or so, but will be back again soon 😉