White Rhino.

Lime-washing the outbuildings; a job that Liz had been itching to do since we finished the house build but had been restrained by the weather and the knowledge that this is a job you traditionally do at Easter. Neither of us had any kind of exact idea of what 'lime wash' actually was, or how you bought it, although Liz had childhood memories of 'Daddy' mixing up buckets of water and powder so that they could paint the garden walls. Of course, the internet had as many versions of what to do as there were websites and our first shopping trip in spring to our faithful builders' merchant, Cooney's, gave us only the rather dim holiday-cover guy who had no idea.

Even 'Daddy' (understandably) let the side down by pleading that his memories of garden walls were 40 years old and that they now use a modern masonry paint like Dulux Weathershield. "Why couldn't we use that?" he asked. But we want to do the traditional job and limewash, we knew, as well as being a coat of white, has strong (caustic) cleaning properties against moss, ferns, creepy-crawlies, goes on nicely with the big-bristled slappy whitewash brushes and copes well with walls which are decent stone but very poorly pointed. The cement in the mixture also works as a 'PVA-style' stabilizer for the dusty joints. It is also way way cheaper than the amount of masonry paint you'd need for these buildings. You would do it every or every-other Easter and your buildings would improve with age. In theory.

Anyway, we wanted the fun of mixing, slapping and 'discovering' this old traditional way. Our barns were both bare concrete and stone and didn't look like they had been limed in 30 years.

So, back to Cooney's we went and this time found the useful guy (Kenny) behind the counter. "Ah!" says he knowledgeably, "You need White Rhino (brand) hydrated lime and white cement" and promptly added them to out order for the wooden laths for the poly-tunnel.

White cement is, as the name would suggest, cement powder with a whitening agent for use where you'd not want your mortar to be the normal grey cement colour. Hydrated lime is, chemically, Calcium di-Hydroxide (Ca(OH)2) or "slaked" lime and is made by 'slaking' (adding water to) Calcium Oxide (also known as 'quicklime' or just 'lime'. We were on our own - none of the websites seemed to know anything about cement mixtures, so Liz had a play with bucket-chemistry. We knew we wanted a mixture of a similar consistency to butter-milk and which would paint onto the walls 'fairly thin and milky looking' but would dry in the sun to that well known blinding white of trad Irish cottages.

We also knew that lime is nasty, irritant, corrosive stuff, so you need to wear gloves and, in our case mix your powder in that keen NE wind which would whip away any 'puffs' of dust before anyone had a chance to inhale them (or use a sensible mask if you are mixing in still air or indoors!). Eye protection is also advised, but that's another story. Old clothes or overalls are ideal. Our best mixture in the end was 5 litres of cold water in a yellow builder's bucket to which was added 2 'scoops' of lime and one of cement. The 'scoop' was a 1 kg yogurt tub so we guess about a litre of volume. That was stirred up with a bit of wood, and off we went.

We both worked at it all day and managed to complete all the way round both the Tígín and the 'milking shed' (now chicken house - goose house). It was not that professional a job and we both found the brushes very slappy. That was handy for firing a rain of wash into crevices and un-pointed bits, but did tend to mean plenty of paint splashed onto the ground, corrugated rooves, bits you hadn't meant to paint, window glass etc.

We were delighted overall with the results. It was a gorgeous blue-sky day and the new whiteness transformed the look of the place. White light is now bouncing around in the yard, kitchen garden and 'pottery' (gap between house and the 'Tíg' which will become a place for potted plants) and we look great as seen from the lane too. The white paint sets off the blue sky beautifully in photographs and I have had much admiring comment on Facebook and from passing locals. We particularly like some of the badly-pointed walls where the stones are now white and the gaps look extra-dark by contrast.

Rather usefully, the mixture, once dry, washes easily out of clothing and washed out of the brushes with plain water. It does tend to rub off on you if you brush against it but we guess that will get better as it ages. It still has not rained so we are both interested to see it all (hopefully) NOT washing away in the Roscommon rain. It also wiped easily off the windows where I had splashed it.

So, there you go, a vast improvement achieved in just 2 'person-days' and for a nice cheap total of just €41 including brushes, indeed, less than that for we did not use up all the lime or cement.