As we mentioned earlier, we have been doing some work on the exterior wall of the main house (called the “sockel” in German) because it was starting to crumble a bit. It seems that our house was rejecting the modern metal framing the previous owner used to patch this wall in the past.

This metal stuff is used on many of the edges of the house but in this area in particular the rain comes down on the wall and has rusted everything out. So the cement around these strips was loose and just making our wall fall apart.

After a little bit of chipping away at the wall, we decided to use the pressure washer to get rid of some of the loose paint and determine where the problems were the worst.

Ayla wanted us to remind everyone that you should use protective goggles if you’re planning to remove old pieces of paint and cement from your house. The stuff just flies off in all directions so you should really play it safe. I know our parents are happy to be reading us saying this 😉

After the power washing, the wall looked quite a bit worse. But we weren’t quite finished destroying it yet.

We basically took off the entire top corner of the wall because it was in really bad shape. We wanted to get as much of the old metal out of the wall as possible too so we aren’t back doing the same project again next year. The wall on the other side of the house has a very naturally done feel to it and no metal framing as far as we can tell. There are lots of curves and bends to it like it was done by hand so we decided to give the same thing a try on this side.

Here’s the corner of the house where they used the metal pieces to brace the corner. As you can see, it doesn’t look too good.
But this isn’t just the sad story of the “sockel.” Once we got things started, we realized that we’d picked up a few things when we did the wall in the former chicken coop. It’s really essential to keep the wall wet while doing this. Otherwise the mortar is just not going to stick. The bigger the spray bottle the better because then you won’t need to fill it up so often. You also need to make sure the mortar stays moist. We find that the initial amount suggested on the bag is just enough to get it moist to start with. After that we usually add in a few more liters of water to keep it workable during our process. Of course it takes us a few hours to do a project so that might have something to do with it…

We had a bit of help from Princess, our Norwegian Forest Cat. This is actually the first time she’s braved the front door and our cats lately spend more and more time downstairs while the dog is outside. We’re pretty thrilled about this because this family has had some rough transitions when it’s come to the dog joining us.

It took us 50 minutes to progress to this stage. At this point we hadn’t yet learned that using tools isn’t always the easiest way to accomplish a project – especially one like this.

We were pretty pleased with the results but still wondered about the final finishing touches.

Here’s where things got easier. Since we wanted a more natural look to the wall, we grabbed some rubber gloves and really dug in. We found that it was massively easier to get the shape we wanted and to keep the mortar on the wall when we were using our hands and in less than 30 minutes we’d finished up the rest of the wall and patched a bunch of other places as well. You can see a bit of my finger lines in the photo below…needless to see you don’t see those anymore 🙂

Ayla was exhausted by all the work. As we were finishing up, we found her in the chicken coop like this. Poor thing, we just worked her so hard. Sleeping and watching us all day is really tough.

Tomorrow morning we’ve got some shopping to do but in the afternoon we plan to patch up the bird doors in this wall and I’m going to get started on the painting. We bought more than enough paint (we think) to do the entire courtyard and picked a nicer “sockel” color that matches the sandstone on the base of the house a bit better so we’re excited to see how things start looking around here. It’s been so long since we haven’t had big gray patches on the walls that I’m not even sure I’ll recognize the place!