I hear you Tom

Tom appeared on the sidewalk with a bucket of whitewash and a long-handled brush. He surveyed the fence, and all gladness left him and a deep melancholy settled down upon his spirit. Thirty yards of board fence nine feet high. Life to him seemed hollow, and existence but a burden.

Mark Twain, Tom Sawyer, Chapter Two, 1876

I have to say that as a kid I would have felt exactly the same as Tom and did so on many occasions, especially when my dad would order tons of soil/gravel or sand and we’d (myself and brothers Ian and Matt) wheel barrow it away to the project site. Having been through that as a kid I don’t seem to mind tedious tasks as long as I can take my time and I don’t include whitewashing as such a task. My Dad wasn’t a task master, he was the best Dad I could have wished for and looking back, these were just jobs my Dad needed help with. So in retrospect I don’t think I would have been able to tackle this house without having spent part of my youth shoveling huge mounds that never seemed to go down with my Dad and siblings.

So back to whitewash, rather than it we made our own, as suggested by our local expert, Derrick McNab. There are lots of recipes out there but this is the one we choose and is based on a recipe by Andy deGruchy of Limeworks.

Our lime whitewash recipe:

• 10 lbs St. Astier Natural Hydraulic Lime (NHL 3.5)
• 2 gallons of water
• ½ cup of Borax (Won’t allow mold & helps repel insects along with the lime)
• 3 lb common table salt (Salt is proven to harden lime whitewash.)
• ½ lb of titanium dioxide pigment for a bit of extra whiteness
• 1 oz Alum to help make the pigment become more colorfast

Before the whitewash went on I sprayed down the wall with water and then ran over it with my random orbit sander to remove any over spray etc. which worked great and in future I may use the sander technique to remove any blemishes. You’ll notice that the whitewash doesn’t look very white, in fact it looks like we are brushing on water. This is normal and it takes a few hours for the chemical reaction to take effect which I think is crystalline in nature which in turn increases its opaqueness. Aimee is working right to left and it’s difficult to tell the difference.

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We’ll probably apply a three coats leaving each coat 24 hours to cure. If we were using regular paint then we would have had to wait a month for the lime mortar to cure but as whitewash is a watered down mortar it can be applied immediately.

By the way we will plaster the top section but are waiting until we can back fill the trench a bit so it’s easier to get.