The Apéro Terrasse

Alex has now finished his work on the apéro terrasse.

This is not to say that the terrace is finished, but now Susan and I will be taking over and putting down the surface, laying tiles, and planting plants,

The new walls of the garage (and the old brick wall) have been covered in chaux blanche, which will dry to a slightly sandy off white colour. The texture is rough, and is made with a taloche (a float, in this instance with a sponge face) after the chaux blanche (lime mortar and sand) has started to harden. We were going to go for a slightly peachy colour, which can be achieved with either coloured sand or powdered tint, but it is very easy to get different mixes of different colours, leaving a patchy wall, so we decided on ordinary masonry sand and no colour.

Putting the texture on the chaux blanche

The wall of the granary next to the terrace and what was the back wall of the toilets have been done in pierres vues. This is different from pierres apparentes (we have now learnt): with the pierres vues, chaux covers all the stones and is then scraped back over the most prominent of the stone, whereas with pierres apparentes less chaux is used, and all the stones stand about a centimetre proud of the pointing.

Pierres vues.Pierres apparentes.

The change in our back garden is amazing. We have done so much: removing a cobbled patch and the concrete "thing", levelling the ground, putting in a fence and gates, dalles gazon, demolishing and rebuilding walls, making sure the walls we had don't fall down, and now we have just about finished the hardscaping and building, and can get on to making it all pretty.

Four months ago the garden looked like this:
(although this photo is from Aug 2008)
Now we have this:

We are feeling pretty pleased with ourselves, because the realisation of this project has so far lived up to the plan, and our plan has lived to to our hopes!

Simon