The photos below are among some recently found by our next door neighbour, Ginny, showing work carried out by her late husband, Paul, before we bought the Old Brewhouse. His repairs and alterations were even more extensive than we realised when he first described them to us. These photos add new insights to the history of the building.
(Top) The front of the house before the plaster over two mediaeval mullion windows was removed. (Above) Rebuilding the chimney at the back, demolished because it was on the point of collapse
For more photos and descriptions of previous work on the building, follow this link.
We’ve been worrying more about fire safety since we put secondary glazing on most of the old windows a year ago. All but one of our mullion windows are impossible to get through because the ancient oak bars are as strong as steel. The secondary glazing (or rather polycarbonate sheeting) makes them even more impenetrable.
Downstairs has no no internal doors, five external doors and two opening casement windows, so reassuring if any of the multiple smoke alarms go off. Upstairs, in the bigger of the old bedrooms, one big window has had enough mullions removed to make it easy to get through as an escape route.
The other 16th century bedroom has three tiny double casement windows. But only one casement on each of the three can be opened – the other side is fixed. A child could squeeze through but an adult would find it a challenge in an emergency.
The simplest solution is to make both sides of a window open. We chose the bigger of the three, which is also the one at the back with an easy drop, to try this out.
The central post (not sure if that’s the joiner’s term for it) was cut through top and bottom. The fixed side of the window was prised away from the frame, trimmed, and hinges were fitted, while still attached to the post.
It was then refitted to the window frame, with a new security latch and two bolts. So we now have a window even a large adult could get through easily. I have to admit, we should have done it years ago.
Taking out the old window, which luckily was lightly nailed. We feared it might break and have to be completely remade, but it was intact.The saw cut and thebottom of the window, which was rotten. The rot was cut out and a new piece glued in.The window was a tight fit and had to be shaved to fit back with hinges The refitted opening window. The weather was breaking so finishing work– painting and a final trim – have been left for a dry spring day.
With the housepecker feeding on the building (see previous post), we were reminded to check the walls for surface cracks and any exposed clay daub beneath. The birds love digging into a soft clay surface to find insects.
Chalk-lime plaster from Anglia Lime is excellent for these quick repairs. It works almost like putting stitches or sticky tape over a crack. When cured, the fibres give a thin layer of plaster a lot of strength. You can see this by picking up a dried spill: it will bend like a piece of leather and be resistant to tearing.
When the plaster is dry, it will be touched up with limewash
This is very helpful on an old clay daub wall, which is always prone to non-structural surface cracking, as the clay underneath the wall’s footings dries in summer and wets in winter. These surface cracks are not serious, but if left can quickly spread, letting water, insects and eventually woodpeckers get at the soft clay underneath.
Our walls are a messy mixture of surfaces accumulated over centuries. We agreed early on with the conservation officer that we’d patch repair as much as possible to preserve the old clay, a piecemeal approach which is probably what the farmers have always done. A full surface strip and replastering loses a lot of old material.
The clay daub seems to have been preserved originally with many layers of limewash straight onto the daub, creating a thick crust like a plaster, which is still there in some places. In more recent years – which could mean back into the 19th century – thin patches of cement have been slapped on to cover damaged clay surfaces, sometimes with broken brick shoved underneath to fill holes in the clay daub.
When we arrived, the first thing we did to the outside was to use new clay daub and a lime and sand render on a dozen areas where old coatings had fallen off, the clay was exposed and woodpeckers had dug deep holes (I’m afraid I do go on about them sometimes, lovely as they are). After some good expert advice, we later switched to a chalk-lime plaster instead of a render, which is much better.
The stitch repairs are not meant to be permanent, and eventually more substantial work will be needed. In fact, we expected these quick and simple repairs to last a few months to give a breathing space while we found time to do the bigger jobs. But in the 5 or 6 years since we started routinely catching cracks in the surface early and plastering over them with the chalk-lime mix, we haven’t had a single large surface failure. In the previous couple of years, several quite large chunks of old render had fallen off.
It sounds like a bodge, and it is, but it’s in the spirit of patching, make do and mend that has kept the walls together for so long.
Of course, when there is a serious deterioration of the wall, for example when some old cement render drops off and pulls clay with it, then there is no alternative to a full repair. We will use new clay daub to fill cavities and then plaster to protect the surface.
Thin layers of ready-mixed chalk lime from Anglia Lime were plastered over the cracking and a few inches either side. You can use a trowel or – if you don’t mind mess – apply and smooth the plaster with your fingers, wearing PVC gauntlets. That works better than it sounds, because it pushes the plaster into the cracks. PVC gloves are also good for smoothing. In either case, a large bucket of water is needed nearby for regular rinsing of tools and gloves.
Our method works, but the result is not pretty – I remember the appalled expression on the face of a professional plasterer when he saw our walls!
We kept hearing the ‘tap, tap, tap’ of a woodpecker on the end gables of the house. By the time we walked round to look, all we heard each time was a rush of wings and a distant woodpecker disappearing over the other end of the garden.
It was so fast and blurred it was hard to tell whether it was the green or the greater-spotted woodpecker. Both are seen regularly in our garden, and we think we’ve also had lesser spotted around. The green woodpecker usually feeds on the ground, rather than clingjng to walls.
The evidence of what the bird was up to was visible in marks on the barge boards and soffits, where the woodpecker must have detected rotten wood and boring insects.
When I get my camera out fast enough one day, I’ll replace this stock photo with one of our visitor.
Today when I arrived round at the wall, the bird was still there, undisturbed by my approach, but I could not see it. The noise continued louder than ever, as if it were amplified.
And so it was: the woodpecker had broken through into the loft, found more old wood to attack, and the noise was amplified in the loft space like a sounding board. Because it was now inside the house, the bird had not sensed me coming.
I watched and listened for a couple of minutes before a (greater, I think) spotted woodpecker emerged rapidly and whirred off. The hole it made is in a soffit, where the two barge boards,and the soffits underneath them, meet at the peak of the gable.
Woodpecker hole in the soffit
There was a tiny hole there before through which only bats could pass. We know that because we once found a dead pipistrelle that had fallen through a crack in a bedroom ceiling (now filled). But the hole is now far bigger, easily enough for squirrels to get inside and rampage round the contents of the loft.
Right at the peak of the gable
What the woodpecker is so keen on inside we don’t yet know, but with plenty of old wood there is no doubt a large population of insects to feast on.We are going to have to stop it.
Previous woodpecker attacks have always been on our old walls, which they dig into searching for insects wherever the clay daub is exposed. We have to do regular repairs to the surface stop those attacks, because woodpeckers are only interested in soft places where plaster and limewash coatings have dropped off.
A proper repair to the soffit will need scaffolding, which will be a lot of money. That whole gable is anyway due for repairs in a few years, and it would be better to do both jobs at the same time to avoid paying twice for scaffolding.
We’ll instead empty that end of the loft of long term storage so we can get to the gable, and block up the hole from inside, possibly by nailing some spare lead sheet over it. That means carrying some old boarding to the loft to lay as I move along, because there’s no floor near that gable end.
I’m not looking forward to it – the job is about as enticing as unblocking a sink, my other pet hate, so it will not be at the top of my priority list. But it must be done.
I’ve just done a few pre-winter repairs of the outside walls in spots where surface render has lost its grip on the clay daub beneath. To my surprise, chalk lime plaster bought in 2014 is still usable.
It appeared to have solidified under an inch or so of water. But after scraping at the surface it quite quickly began to recover its original consistency. Lime putty when stored properly lasts many years – I still have an old tub of it in good condition – and this plaster is simply putty, chalk and fibre.
It is not entirely traditional: it uses synthetic fibres and they last indefinitely in the tub, unlike haired plaster, where the hair begins to disintegrate after a month or two.
Chalk-lime plaster – quick repair ahead of the winter
The old plaster is not ideal, because it takes hard work with a trowel to get back to the right consistency. But having forgotten to order a new tub, it’s good enough to protect small areas of exposed clay from rain and woodpeckers for a while. Next, I must order a new tub.
Chalk-lime plaster used externally has proved extremely effective over the years in temporarily patching areas of old wall that we haven’t fully repaired yet. A thin layer behaves almost like a sticking plaster over the cracks where old render is beginning to come away from the wall. Once cured, it has considerable strength and resists tearing.
There’s one quite large patch where the old render has almost entirely lost its grip on the clay – tapping reveals a hollow behind – but plaster over the cracks has kept it in place for the last few years.
It’s admittedly a bodge, but we wanted to delay full repairs as long as possible while effort and money went into other priorities. In due course the whole of one gable and about half of one wall still await a full overhaul.
Both will be a challenge. In the days when our house was part of a farm, a lot of running repairs on the clay were done with cement render. A bit less than a third of the walls is still cement render. The rest is our past repairs and some areas of wall that have been untouched for many years.
The latter are not even rendered, but are clay daub covered with many coats of limewash over a long period. The limewash has built into a thick layer that, until we examined it closely, we thought was in fact a render. So our farm building’s exterior walls may once have been rough clay daub given a protective limewash.
We are still finding out new things about the Old Brewhouse, most recently from a blast of freezing air that suddenly started coming out with unusual ferocity from the gaps round a fireplace cupboard door. Inside the cupboard, bits of plaster had fallen and a gap above the inside of the door had got bigger.
I anxiously thought – wind damage: what’s blown loose? But closer inspection showed that the wind was blowing down a narrow gap between the structure of the big brick fireplace, with its bread oven and chimney, and the clay daub wall of the house.
This nice door was made for The Old Brewhouse when it was a farm service building where nobody lived.
It has thin planks with cracks between, and is a heat sink in the house during winter, no matter how much draft proofing is stuffed in and around it.
As a listed building, we’re supposed to make a formal application to the council heritage department and pay a fee if we wish to replace it. Our solution was to leave the old door untouched, apart from a few new screw holes, and build an identical door on the inside of it to double the thickness, cover the cracks and improve its thermal performance. It should make a noticeable difference to the warmth of the room in midwinter.
I’ve just laid 35 feet of new drain from the house down to the pond, and discovered a layer of what seem to be 18th or early 19th century drains, of a type that a little internet research discovers were named horseshoe drains. I have often noticed, whether at Greek ruins or at Norman Castles, that the remains of old drain and sewage systems fascinate visitors, myself included, so the annoying fact that one of our key drains was totally clogged with tree roots at least produced something nerdishly interesting. Continue reading “Ancient drains”
What wood is the floor made from and how old is it?
Clue (1): an extra pair of joists made of ash, not the usual oak, have been inserted crudely either side of the central beam, with notches and wedges instead of a mortice and tenon.
I go into a great deal of detail in these floor posts, on the grounds that if you’re interested in repairing a very old floor you’ll need it; for the rest, read no further! Over the years it’s the blog posts like this that seem to be read most, I assume by people doing similar jobs.
Rotten sections, weakened sections, blackened, stained and crack and holed sections – the whole messy old floor came together into one attractive, if battered, whole, once beeswax polish was applied.
It’s great what a coat of beeswax can do for a damaged floor.
The first thing to do was to protect the room underneath from debris falling through the many cracks as we worked on the floor above. The solution was a plastic tarpaulin tied to the joists:
The second thing to do was to make sure the boards were firmly on their joists so not springy when walked on. There were two bad patches, where the boards had to be screwed down hard onto the joists to stop movement. Since the undersides were exposed, we were also able to push in wood spacers from below. Continue reading “Repairing the floor – 2”
The floor we want to repair is of unknown age but must be pretty old, not just because of its battered state but because the boards are of uneven widths of up to a foot or so, presumably because they were cut from the same tree. Continue reading “Repairing the floor – 1”
We’ve switched today from an old WordPress design to a new one that’s clearer and easier to edit. We also have a new site name, https://oldsuffolkhouse.com.
And now for the next challenge, but I need to get fit first: does everyone get quite as stiff as I do when trying to work for long hours on a floor? It is the most uncomfortable position to work in, apart perhaps from plastering a ceiling, but we are about to start on repairing a lovely old floor that until now has been covered to protect it, so the pain will be worthwhile (I hope). Not entirely sure what it is, but think that it is oak or elm. More later, as we get going on the job next week.
The hot, dry weather has produced many more cracks than usual in our front wall.
Much of it is plain clay daub with thick layers of limewash and here and there a smear of recent cement where previous owners had tried to stop the clay falling out. There is no evidence of it ever having been rendered or plastered on laths. Continue reading “Cracks”
saving The Old Brewhouse 