De rendering the house.....

I have spent the bank holiday weekend removing the render from the house. That is a tough job, I can tell you, but I thought I would enclose some pictures of the work. Firstly,this was the tower scaffold that I had to build and then climb. I would love to tell you that it was straighter than it looked, but I suspect that it wasn't! I am glad that I didn't see this before I worked on it!

 The work of removing render is unbelievably hard. Seriously, if you are considering doing it, don't - the drill I use for it weighs quite a lot, and hammers at you for hours and hours. It hurts - my arms were aching after a half hour, and I had probably 15 hours of work to do over the weekend.

The other thing is that the result of the removal of the render causes damage to the brickwork - some from the drill itself, some from the stickiness of the render to the bricks, and some from the poor quality of the brickwork anyway.

 

 From these pictures, it looks quite a nice wall, but 70-80% of the bricks are damaged. We are going to re-render, the whole purpose of doing this is to replace the old concrete render with a lime-based one, which will let the wall breath.

 Oh, and it is very messy. All of this render needs repeatedly clearing up, and skipping. It is very dusty, and the render breaks as it hits the floor, meaning that it is small lumps. I needed to shower and bath and shower again at the end of the days work.

The skip was not very full, if I am honest, but there is actually quite a lot of render in it! Having a skip is a necessity, because there is a whole pile of rubble and junk to be disposed of

And yet, after a long and hard weekend, it was all removed. The walls do look better un-rendered, and I would love to be able to leave them without anything on them, although, unfortunately, it would require replacing most of the brickwork.

And yet, there is, I think a lesson from my life, from my move away from the church. Let me explain.

My faith is like the brick wall. Originally, it was built as needed, and was fine. However the more I became involved in the church system, the more this faith was covered in render - a layer to present to the outside world, fastened onto my faith. As such, there is nothing wrong with this - it serves to protect my faith, and to cover cracks and problems.

The problem comes when this coating causes problems in the wall, when the church causes problems in my faith. In this case, the only option is then to remove the render, the church. This is a very tough, painful, and difficult task to remove this render, and the results are not great. There are still some pieces of render stuck to the walls, and the walls that are left are permanently damaged. This damage is partly the result of the covering - the render, the church - and partly the result of the removal of this.

It is also worth noting that some patching has been done to the wall in the meantime, and this has been done in the certain knowledge that it will be rendered over. Sometimes areas of my faith have needed to be patched and repaired, but this has been done knowing that the church fronting will patch over any real damage.

And what is most significant is that the wall needs to be re-rendered. The damage has been done, and I need some form of support and covering. I am working on finding the places that I can do this, making sure that it is done in a way that allows my faith to breathe. This is a whole lot harder - both for my faith and for the house - than you would believe.

Overall, it would have been much better if the wall had not been rendered at all.