To help the the barn renovation into two gites I ordered La Plomberie and L'installation électrique from Amazon which arrived today. They are both in French, surprise surprise, but do provide the rules and regulations and best practice and lots of pictures :-)
Finished chipping out the loose and small pieces of cement that were proud between the stones of the fireplace and hearth ready for Caroline to point with chaux et sable. Whilst I was working inside the fireplace I put an uplighter on the hearth so I could see what I was doing. Caroline suggested a couple of downlights hidden above the mantelpiece inside the chimney because the light showed off the stones beautifully. It did look very good, so that's another job on the list.
Caroline finished pointing the fireplace by late evening and it makes a huge improvement. She experimented with a few different mixes of lime, sand and cement and ended up with a 5 parts sand (sable) and 2 parts lime (chaux). Using even a small quantity of cement made the mix too grey.
We did lots of surfing for the correct lime mortar mix, but there were so many different variations. The best resource we found was Dry walls using lime mortar
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