Pointing The Way

[peterbirks]

I have damp coming into the bathroom. I've figured out why. The side of the house is in serious need of repointing.

Although I live in a "terrace", the fronts of the houses on one side are split apart by one-metre gap, with the two houses only joining at the rear. It's an odd configuration, and this has caused a problem. Access to the side of the house is difficult when it comes to scaffolding. Which is probably why the rest of the house has been repointed (about 30 years ago, I guess), but this bit hasn't.

I'm aware that nearly all of you are fucking useless when it comes to stuff like this. "Get someone in to do it" is followed by "we did, and it was a disaster...."

But, I did a little bit of research, and discovered some interesting facts.

First, brickies hate repointing. It's mind-numbingly boring, and you have to get rid of the old mortar to a depth of 12mm to get it done properly, but, because it's so boring and because most customers have no idea about houses, brickies often only do 6mm or so. If you are lucky enough to find a good brickie who is willing to do it properly, you are probably looking at a bill in excess of £20 a square metre. I have no idea how many square metres are involved, so I shall think of a number and treble it. That gives me 700 for the whole house. Christ, surely not.

Why the whole house, and not just the side? This brings me to the "secondly". That being, I'm fairly sure the repointing done 30 years ago used portland cement-based mortar, rather than the proper lime mortar. The Portland mortar is too strong, too inflexible. So it causes fractures or even disintegration in the brick, which has to take the strain of the cement mortar's inflexibility. Some of the red brick at the front of the house (it has provincial red brick and London yellow brick in various places -- part of the design) is flaking away, and this could be caused by cement pointing.


Lime mortar is, needless to say, pricier.

None of this means the house is falling down, but it does make for potential problems that I could either bodge up or fix properly. I don't do "bodge-ups", so it looks like a proper fix. Unfortunately, this will mean talking to the solicitor who lives next door again, because access to the side of my house requires putting scaffolding on her land. Shit.


Anyhoo, none of this is really depressing me, although I suppose it should. Challenges like this are fun, in their own way. It's part and parcel of owning an old house, and there's a certain pride involved. "A home, not a house", as they say.

I came across a nice quote from an American site....

Rick Roger's two-story Georgian has stood for more than 80 years in the prosperous suburb of Evanston, Illinois, north of Chicago.

Which is an interesting definition of the term "Georgian". Never let it be said that the Americans have no sense of history.

They do; they just haven't any idea when it was. Or perhaps the house stood somewhere else for 140 years, before being moved to Evanston. Somehow, I doubt it.


++++++++

I went to the doctor's for my inoculations this morning, and they had a print of the wall of Lewisham Hill, circa 1825, looking down towards Lewisham from the edge of Blackheath. I had no idea that my road was so old! As you may be aware (and, if you aren't, I'll post a photo of it one day), Lewisham Hill is an oddity, because the pavements run about three metres higher than the road, with brick walls on either side of the road.

The print shows that this "through-cut" was in place in 1825, and it looked fairly old there. No houses on my side of the road, though. On the opposite side were what looked rather like the fishermen's cottages you see in Chatham and Gilligham. Real Charles Dickens, Dombey and Son/David Copperfield stuff. Fascinating.

I still can't see why the road was cut lower than the promenade. The only guess I can come up with was that this prevented strollers going from Lewisham up to Blackheath from being splashed with mud as carriages and horses passed by.


Cool, or what?

And note that, not content with using one proper word (pavement) that will have some Americans scratching their heads, I then used another (strollers) which will get them thinking along entirely the wrong lines. Oh, yes, I know that it's easy targets, that kind of thing. But allow an old man some fun....

The inoculations were a doddle, given the dire warnings expressed by some people (and by the nurse) that I might feel "fluey". Pah! For a start the injections went unnoticed. After you've had your face filled with enough novocaine to kill an elephant, merely for the extraction of baby teeth (if I had any more to be extracted, I'd cut the local anasthetic required by a factor of 10) a couple of poxy jabs in the arm were, literally, not even felt. "Oh, have you done it?" I said.

++++++

The network at work went down today, just as I was sending out the second newsletter (from home). Chaos all round. We actually had to resort to the telephone (quaint instrument....) because the e-mail system was fucked. Finally got the newsletter to the punters by 1pm -- which was a bit irritating, since I had finished it at 10.30am. So it goes.


___________

Comments

[the-maenad.livejournal.com]

Could they perhaps mean George V?

A horrid thought: in a century houses being built in the US now will be called 'Georgian' for all the wrong reasons.

Sunken roads.

[(Anonymous)]

If Devon lanes, which are all like this, sunk deep beneath the surrounding countryside, are any guide, it is probably the simple result of a few hundred years of waggon traffic gradually eroding away the road surface. When the road finally gets tarred or whatever, it's far simpler to tar over the existing surface and put in a pavement up at the top than to build back up to the original level. No design involved, just natural processes

John W

Re: Sunken roads.

[peterbirks.livejournal.com]

Which would imply that Lewisham Hill was already several hundred years old in 1825?

Cooler still.

PJ

Re: Sunken roads.

[peterbirks.livejournal.com]

The only matter mitigating against this rather attractive theory is that Lewisham Hill is the only road like this in the entire area, and I am sure that there are many other equally old or older roads that have been lanes of some sort for several hundred years in the Blackheath area. Hyde Vale and Crooms Hill, leading down into Greenwich, would be solid candidates to have developed in the same way, surely?

Or perhaps that side of the hill is more modern, what with the park, and everything.

PJ

Re: Sunken roads.

[jellymillion.livejournal.com]

Dunno about the provenance of the raised pavement/sunken road thing (but hopefully it'll run and run as this is the sort of thing about which we need to know) but I can at least confirm that Crooms Hill is old, probably going back in some form to Henry VIII, since it was he who enclosed Greenwich Park. And now I come to think of it, there is a bit of pavement near the top of the hill that I think is in fact elevated. I ought to have better recall, having liveed there for 8 years, but sadly I don't.

Re: Sunken roads.

[peterbirks.livejournal.com]

I am going to go out and check this stuff out when the weather gets better. As you say, this is the kind of thing that we need to know about.

PJ

Re: Sunken roads.

[(Anonymous)]

Not every Devon lane is sunken, so there's probably a soil factor involved as well. But it does make the fact real, that Lewisham was, not so long ago, a small country village near London, hard as it is to imagine today

Paying less for it

[geoffchall.livejournal.com]

Why should you be currently responsible for the whole of the wall? Isn't a part of this belonging to downstairs? If it is, there is a different slant on things. If the purchase of downstairs is going to happen, then you'd be better advised waiting until you have a tenant for downstairs.

In that fashion the repair will be a necessary cost for both premises and half of it will then be tax-deductible, but only if it happens whilst you have a tenant. Of course in order to take advantage of such a tax relief you will have to make a profit on the rental at some stage or other.

Re: Paying less for it

[peterbirks.livejournal.com]

I didn't want to add unnecessary complications for the readership, Geoff. I had considered various tax implications.....

PJ

Re: Paying less for it

[geoffchall.livejournal.com]

Ah, I understand. Keep it simple - there may be Americans reading it.

Re: Paying less for it

[real-aardvark.livejournal.com]

Yes, Geoff. Maybe even accountants.

I'm trying to calculate the ratio of Nobel-prize winning Americans to Nobel-prize winning accountants, but sadly my mental calculator keeps coming up with the result: NaN.

I wonder what this might mean?

Oh, and by the way, as an Englishman, I can't say that we have much more of a track record than the Americans when it comes to bashing two small grey cells together.

Pavements

[(Anonymous)]

Would it be possible that there was once another line of houses in the street, which were then knocked down to make way for the road? From what you say there was nothing there in 1825, but the Victorians didn't just build long-lasting houses and they sometimes built houses very closely together. Honiton (another Devon analogy) has some raised pavements and a very wide main street because there used to be houses in the middle.

Cheers,

Niall L

Re: Pavements

[peterbirks.livejournal.com]

I see what you are getting at, Niall, but I doubt this. For a start, it's on a hill, and the logical place to have built the close-together houses would have been on the flat parts nearer the Ravensbourne and Quaggy rivers at the bottom of the hill (and, indeed, this was where Lewisham was first developed, in the early 19th century).

Secondly, it was mainly country in 1825. I was surprised to see any houses at all in the print, but this was obviously due to the proximity to Blackheath -- hip, even then.

PJ

Re: Pavements

[(Anonymous)]

Peter,
good to see that a non poker related post should generate such a wealth of comments. For the record next door had a new roof (cost £16,000-reusing the old slate)cost of hire of scaffolding £4,000,they also repointed at the same time. I think I should get into scaffolding seems more + e/v than poker

later

Ben

Liverpool

Re: Pavements

[peterbirks.livejournal.com]

Hi Ben:

I had the house re-roofed six years ago,, and that cost £9K, with the cost split between the two flats. I can't remember what the cost of the scaffolding was, but it wasn't 4K.

That would indicate a cost of about 7K for repointing the whole house (which may or may not be necessary, and perhaps 2K for just the side. Then again, it would be easier to get someone for a bigger job. And, as Geoff pointed out, I have to consider tax possibilities. There's no way I will get the people selling me the flat downstairs to pay any of this (and neither would I expect them to).

Looks like I might be doing some sever spreadsheet crunching.

Re: Pavements

[(Anonymous)]

Are there areas where the pavements and the road are at about the same level. If so, houses may have been built at different base heights. To make the roads usable by car/carriages (ie no steps) they'd have dig down in places to cope with undulations and a 6-foot drop straight out of the front-door probably doesn't do much for the value of a house.

As an occasional, GH-era, non-London-based, non-poker playing reader, I prefer your non-poker playing entries. I hope you continue to include them.

Cheers,

Niall L

Annoying Americans

[real-aardvark.livejournal.com]

Hope the tooth thing is going better.

Lovely to see all the London-centric replies to this post. I was particularly charmed by your suggestion that the raised pavement was intended to protect the petticoats of strollers from Lewisham up to to Blackheath.

Now, I happen to like Lewisham. (Compared to almost the entire rest of London, it has a certain de profundis charm to it.) I also like hanging around Blackheath -- with or without petticoats -- but really, who, outside the bizarre world of people who grow up in the festering dump of London could give a shit about the height of pavements in an area not noticeably frequented by tourists and therefore not economically important to the glorious New Britain?

But, to your point about Georgian houses in Evanston, Illinois. I agree that Evanston does not, perhaps, have the extensive degree of Dickensian filth so proudly in evidence in Lewisham, Blackheath, or indeed most of the rest of the middle bit of London that didn't get bombed to shit by the Nazis.

I would venture to suggest, however, that you are missing the point.

Houses in America are sold on a packaged basis. You want Georgian? We'll give you Georgian. Normally, it's a timber frame. In Evanston, it might even involve a brick frontage. But it's just a style. The enduring styles seem to be "colonial" (whatever that is, and the mere psychology of the thing is quite interesting) or "ranch."

There is nothing wrong with any of this. Nobody (or at least nobody sane) in Evanston actually believes that, in purchasing a "Georgian," they are purchasing a granite pile with Doric columns and eighteen-foot high ceilings. (Although there are too few of these about outside Magdalen College -- believe me, damp rot wasn't the problem.)

What they are buying is a Style.

A bit like Tudorbethan, or Jacobethan. These things are hideous, and Barratts have not improved on the dubious base whereon Betjeman coined the phrase.

In passing, I should note that, even though Evanston itself may have been settled too late to make an adequate claim on "Georgian," the country as a whole (and particularly the north-east and early parts of the mid-west) was founded on nothing but. So at least it has a tiny bit of lineage.

Unlike, say, half-timbered bits of crap in Basildon.

Re: Annoying Americans

[peterbirks.livejournal.com]

Dentist was fine, teeth restored to normal braced condition (i.e., tightened after the progress made from last wiring) and signs of small progress. Unfortunately, we're basically waiting and praying for my upper number three teeth on either side to spot that there is a gap in the market and to start appearing through the gum. Just a little bit, that's all that's needed.

I was aware of the American definition of houses as a "style". This is part of the American drive for efficiency. They eliminate what they see as redundancy in language. So, what we would call "mock-Georgian", they call "Georgian". Unfortunately, the redundancy eliminated sometimes isn't really a redundancy, leading to miscommunication at a later date. How often do we hear of cock-ups in the US arising from people on opposite ends of the phone line being intrinsically incapable of communicating with each other in what is theoretically the same language?

Lewisham doesn't so much have Dickensian filth as 1960sism filth. If they would only just tear down the old shopping centre completely, life would be so improved.

PJ

Teeth Fall 9.3% on Rumors of Merger

[real-aardvark.livejournal.com]

I don't think it's anything to do with efficiency; I believe it's to do with class. Which Americans don't have, of course; ho ho. (You can read that as sarcasm or as irony. I went to a grammar school. I know and respect the difference.) I recommend Paul Fussell's book on the subject, which is extremely funny, very perceptive, and not particularly outdated, even now.

I do, however, recall someone masquerading as Peter Birks, around twenty years ago, pointing out with some force that Esperanto was a stupid idea, because the very idea of simple things like "coffee" and "table" do not even translate across small barriers like the Channel, much less a greater cultural divide.

I just think you were being unfair to the good folk of Evanston. You can walk around the much more "Georgian" areas of Savannah and, er, Georgetown (and probably "The Most Splendiferous Palladian Palace in Greater Las Vegas!!!!! Victor Kyam says, "The South Sea Bubble burst, so I bought this instead!"), and it won't look Georgian to you. Or to Quinlan Terry. But it's still, in a sense, Georgian, and to people living in Evanston, that's what Georgian is. It doesn't betoken the mule-headed ignorance that so many people ascribe to even the decent parts of America.

Which was part of my point, really, and I'm sorry I didn't express it at all well. When Americans say "Georgian," they really mean "Palladian, and built of wood," and there is actually a very long tradition of this, stretching back to New England in the eighteenth century (see collected bits in a reconstructed village near Worcester, Mass.) -- possibly other areas, and I apologise to knowledgeable Americans if I'm missing important bits out -- and pretty much unbroken, at least through the voortrek across the Appalachians and towards the Great Lakes.

(What is perhaps more amusing to a jaded Brit, though, is that they use the term "Georgian" at all. Maybe the odd helping of I, II or IV is what they're thinking of, although, God knows, III was almost certainly the most intelligent and sensible. Outside of going mad, of course.)

And my point about Basildon (sorry Basildon, you're just an example) still stands. Our estate agents sell us crap based on "style." Why complain when American real estate people do that?

But you're right about 1960sism filth. Class aside, I have a horrible suspicion that a common hatred thereof is the only thing holding our country together. How can people revere a decade that dumped so much horror on pretty much every corner of Great Britain? I like the Seventies, myself.

Apparently, they've torn down the old '60s shopping centre in Coventry, where I was born. (Well, not in the shopping centre.)

Unfortunately, it's still Coventry. And Lewisham will forever be Lewisham.