Our Restoration Plans

The structure of the house is part ashlar and part random stone construction with quoins, with lots of land around it. It has high ceilings, spacious rooms, old sash windows and red and black floor tiles, plus a late Victorian extension at the back which we intend to demolish and replace with a stone-built extension of slightly greater size.

Our plan for the house is to restore it largely as it used to be, using appropriate materials (i.e. lime not cement etc).  The only constraint here is that Jane does not want the interior to remind her of the sort of house that her grandparents lived in when she was young!  Hence if we aim for Late Georgian/early Victorian rather than late Victorian, I should be OK.  

What's wrong with the house?

Issues with the house are:

• The leaking roof
• The ivy (on roof and walls)
• The dampness, principally on the walls and upstairs ceilings
• The brick extension
• The lack of a gas supply
• The lack of any form of central heating

I also anticipate that the entire electrical and plumbing systems will need to be replaced, and that the joists and rafters may be suffering from dry rot/woodworm/other.  Apart from that, it's great!

The current single-storey extension is in danger of self-demolishing as it is only of single brick construction and the end wall is bowing to a considerable degree.  Also, the extension's door and window frames are rotten, the roof leaks, the floor is damp and overall there aren't many good things to be said for it.

Fixing the roof and guttering etc will address the major cause of dampness.  The work to be done will be to remove all ivy and slates, repair the roof structure as required, fit a waterproof membrane, fit new battens, repair soffits and fascia, fit new cast-iron gutters and downpipes and replace lead flashing and slates.  The photo on the right shows one of the downpipes with a fairly obvious major fracture which had clearly been there for some years, judging from the damage to the pointing lower down.

So there will also be pointing to be repaired as required with lime mortar (NOT with cement - I'll talk about that separately), windows to be repaired, and various matters to be addressed at ground level where the ground has risen up.  In some places the soil is against the wall at a level ABOVE the floor inside, which causes dampness; elsewhere someone has used concrete to fill in gaps (for instance) between the stone step and the wall outside the front door, thereby raising the ground level again and causing dampness.  The photo on the left shows a wonderful bit of cementing which traps two inches of rain water against the wall, between the drain and the edging.  It's hardly surprising that there is a lot of dampness!

There's also a small crack above the front door (photo right), but I'm not yet sure if this is a structural item or just a decorative surround.