Look at our pretty house

And still the house smells faintly of smoke, rather than of fresh paint.

Although, you may be wondering why the house should be smelling of fresh paint at all.

Do you remember, months and months and months ago, the electricity people came and took down all the rusting, ancient power poles and put the power cables underground?  I don't remember when it was - I do remember being quite excited because it meant that we had the possibility of widening our gate so we could use the driveway (although we haven't). Plus there was the great excitement of having traffic lights outside our house and being able to watch the chaos that that sometimes caused.  Anyway. The consequence of that was that they took down all the now redundant wires from the front of our house, leaving the poor house looking even more tattered and sorry for itself than it had already been!

The Builder wasn't entirely delighted because it meant that the render was broken and water was getting into it.  Eventually, of course, that meant that the render would rot and then fall off.  So when the electricity people came back recently to do the same thing up along Ward Street he went out and had a word with them.

A few weeks later a couple of bods turned up with a ladder and a bucket of render and patched the house up.  This meant that our tatty and sorry for itself white house was now a tatty and sorry white house with patches, splashes, stripes and dollops of grey all over it. 

A few days later a painter turned up to assess the situation.  And a day or so after that the electricity people made an offer.  We'll paint the whole of the front of your house if you'll pay £300 towards the cost of it.

Since we had been thinking that patching the render (which needed doing before any wires were removed) and repainting the front of the house (likewise) would be likely to cost us in the region of £1000 - we accepted with alacrity.

I meant to take some "before" photos of the house, showing the grey render - but there was an unexpected break in the rain that hasn't ceased falling since the Environment Agency declared England to be in a Serious State of Drought and the painter came before we were expecting him.

So here is the house after the wires were removed but before the render was patched

And here it is now

Isn't it pretty?

Although now, of course, the side wall is looking very dingy in comparison.  Sigh!

(And I think we need a pretty new front door to match the awesomeness of the windows and the newly painted wall.  But that can wait until after the GWT is sorted out)

PS  I have just trawled my way back through the blog and found that the power pole was taken down and all the wires removed from the front of the house back in October 2010 !!!!!  So you may well not remember it after all :-D  )