The Basement

Although that's the exterior of the building dealt with, there's still the actual basement or the "area" as it was known, to decorate.   This is the servant's entrance.

As the basement is attached to the house, it opens in three sections with arches dividing each area.

The back walls were painted in the same finish as the house and a deep "skirting" with coving was added to give a bit detail and to match up with the outside of the basement. For the walkway fibre glass sheet flagstones were used.  

(I hasten to add, the raggedy edge shown is not there now - that was just a test piece put in to see the effect)

Once that was laid the walls had to be tackled.   To do this, and because of the arches leading through to each section, paper templates were cut and dealt with as individual pieces.    As luck would have it, I found an Edinburgh property on the market for sale with a picture of the basement area giving just the detail I needed.   This showed the walls as bare stone.   To do this I used Bromley Craft Products stencil and compound which I already had in my stash. That was the easy part!

This is the effect you get immediately after removing the stencil. It then had to be sanded and painted, using acrylic paint, to achieve what I hoped would be a realistic looking stone wall. This took some time, I may say, and heaven knows how many times this was repainted just to get the required effect but eventually I think I've achieved this and I'm happy with it.

There was just one little final touch - a pair of nesting housemartins.