Pointing The Way
Mar. 19th, 2007 11:54 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
peterbirksI 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.
___________
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.
___________
