Harling is the process of throwing a lime slurry onto a wall. I’m guessing the name derived from the word hurl. We’re doing this to replace the flaking lime render on our walls. Lime mortar walls are porous and I believe it’s normal for the surfaces to flake like this over time. These walls probably haven’t been touched in 150 years so they deserve a little love. The harl coat isn’t a finish coat, rather it provides a good textured coat for subsequent coats. As we will be framing out the downstairs to add insulation we will leave the majority of the walls with just this harl coat. Only internal walls will have finishing coats.
It’s a bit of a messy and physical job with lots of the lime ending up on the floor. You have to wear eye protection as the lime is pretty caustic and will burn. Mixing lime is also pretty time consuming as a batch will take a minimum of twenty minutes to mix. Lucky our friends John Paul and Joe and Deborah both lent us decent mixers which made the process a lot easier.
For the mixing process you have to dry mix the sand and Natural Hydraulic Lime 3.5 (we buy ours from the fine people at Limeworks) for 5 minutes, add water and then mix for a further twenty minutes to make the render more workable or ‘fatter’.
We are thinking of buying or hiring something like the Render Gun for the harl coat and pay someone to do the finish coat.
That does look hard work. Well done 👍🏼
You giys are bad ass! I’m eternally impressed. Makes my house projects look like child’s play. Very inspiring.
Thanks Brian, kind words 🙂