moulding and stucco restoration part 2

Moulding and Stucco Restoration Stockwell part 2

Roof Dormers

Once the lovely scaffolder Terry had put up the scaffold (you don’t often hear the word lovely about scaffolders but I think most of them are deeply sensitive human beings who are trying to protect themselves. Do read my other post “When scaffolders cry ’ Anyway It was the best I have ever been on exactly the right height plenty of room to get to the working areas, brilliant .We started on the dormers

The dormers had been re- built in brick when the roof was renewed some years ago. A raking section running up to  form the dormer roof We had to re-render it first using sand and lime before we ran the moulding round the window
There was no existing moulding from the original dormers so I copied it from the house next door a bit of a long way away so I could only guess at the actual shape .In truth most of the mouldings are the based on Greek and Roman geometric shapes so you can pretty much work it out from a distance and nobody can check it at that height so that's a bonus

brick formed dormers

We floated the background flat and made the running mould set it out in preparation to run the arch and architrave mould

running mould horsed up

setting out to run arch 

A note on materials: Roman cement

In other parts of this blog I have mentioned that this type of work was at this time almost invariably carried out using Parkers or Roman cement what we now describe as a natural cement. A very fast setting clay/lime based dry powder you can recognise it by its red/brown colour and in this case some yellowy /buff colour elements Its quite an interesting material so widely used its production was limited for a while because of the coastal erosion caused by the over quarrying of the marlstone It was superseded by Portland cement in the later part of the 19th century but a very similar material is available and the more you use it the more you realise why they loved it Although in truth I am not sure it is exactly the same stuff but good enough. Where we can we use similar materials to the original and I know it’s a minefield of opinions but It works well and I cant be bothered to get involved as long as the owner was happy and got what she wanted

Arch head run

arch and archivolt run and joints made good

Render top coat finished

raking section mould at the top of the dormer

note the fish scale slates on the roof 

A long distance shot of one of the finished dormers some say that my work always looks better from a distance

Incidentally, I don’t know why but it always pisses down when we do this type of work So if your garden needs a bit of rain give me a call