Brick Fireplace Floor

[xanthe]

I've finally traced the last remnants of cat pee down to the brick on earth floor in the inglenook in the sitting-room and nothing is helping it.

Given that the floor is in a pretty bad way and that the cement edging is cracked to pieces, I decided to take the bricks up section by section, clear the earth back to the floor level (dirt floor an inch below the bricks in very good nick) and give the bricks a bit of a scrub.

Lots of photos taken so I can jigsaw them back later.

A fair number of the bricks are in enough pieces to resemble a mosaic rather than a brick, and now that I've take a few up, they are a complete mix of old and very modern - and it's the modern ones that are in the worse state.

Soooo, a few questions:

a) given that the cement edging is cracked into about 50 pieces and will need to be replaced, do you think it's fine that I am taking the bricks up, removing the earth and then relaying?

b) would it be counted as a repair if I replace the very broken bricks and/or replace the nasty modern ones (horrible colour) with some nice reclaimed or modern "old" bricks that are a better match for the original ones?

c) What earth do I use to refill? Doesn't strike me that John Innes No. 3 is quite right? :?:

d) Soaking the bricks has made them a bit too clean in places? Good recipes for olding up that won't smell awful? I was thinking a mix of ashes, soil and water and then a tiny bit of beeswax over the top at the end?

Fwiw, we have a woodburner, but it was an open fire until 2011. However, it's all brick, there is no hearthstone at all.

Pic...

 

[bennoa1]

The light areas are probably lime and the dark patches are where someone has put cement in. I'd replace with lime.
I've got bricks in the cellar and they aren't at all level. At some point I'll lift them and put a thin bed of lime down underneath then bed them back on lime. I'd probably use NHL5 if its a hearth as it is more robust than the 3.5.

 

[xanthe]

The picture is showing the 'best' part of the floor (ie least broken up).

Unfortunately, lime appears to have been a substance unknown to the POs - both last and the ones before them - and I am only grateful that the last ones had little zeal for doing the place up. We still have lime mortar on the external walls, just cement pointing, and luckily whoever did the walls just shoved expanding foam, gypsum and polyfiller on them but didn't remove the historical stuff underneath. We were listed in the early 50's which probably helped.

The whole of the inglenook and the brick pillars have been repointed with cement. Fortunately they didn't damage the areas where knives were sharpened on them! And the back is painted with white gloss and the pillars have been badly stripped back to brick whereas the other way round was probably more how it would have been (we date back to 1580, but the fireplace is a little bit later maybe 1630 ish... surveyor and CO can't agree).

The dark patches between are just soil. The light ones are a charming mix of cat sick, hair balls, sand and cement :roll: I've found no traces of lime between them at all.

Here's a photo of the 'trench' I've done so far which has removed the loose stuff and swept back to the original 'floor'. Given the state of the cement edge, I'm thinking I may need to call a halt on taking up until I can work out what to do about that.

 

[xanthe]

Regarding the edge...

The fireplace sits just outside the footprint of the oldest part of the house. Underneath the sitting-room is a big ashlar-lined cellar and the the edge of the fireplace is exactly in-line with the inside wall of the cellar. We have deal floorboards in the sitting-room and the bricks have been set right against them and then concrete poured into the gap. I would guess that the work was done in around 1970 when the then owners were doing major works.

What could be used to form a new edge between bricks and floorboard? This house moves constantly and my daughter is convinced we have some very heavy footed ghosts which probably explains why the longest section of intact concrete is now about 2 inches!

If I used lime as bennoa1 suggests, can I just have that and nothing else? Do I need an edge at all?

Here's a pic of the whole fireplace from the EA's pics.



In the room (the wall to the right is the one I have been merrily stripping the woodchip from )

 

[bennoa1]

Some of the brick look level with the floorboard and some above the level. I'd remove the cement mortar joints and put lime in but make sure you put plastic down on the floorboards as the lime will stain. You need to get a garden sprayer as you'll need to wet the bricks before you add lime and keep the lime damp for a day or two.
Has the other lime mortar joint got small stones in it - if so mix the lime with sharp sand to get a similar mix. We've go the same issue with a 1970's major refurb with cement and gypsum plaster everywhere. I'm removing as much as possible but its a slow process. Walls faced with cement have taken most of the face of the brick and turned some to pure powder. The gypsum internally has bubbled (now removed) and again the face of the bricks has gone. Cement floors in most downstairs rooms but thankfully lots of original features about to uncover.

 

[steveb]

not quite on the same scale, but we limed up to the edge of the floorboards

echo the warning about lime staining wood, cover it well and clean up anything quickly!

 

[xanthe]

That looks lovely!

So, could I just fill the space between the bricks and the floorboard with lime plaster? NHL?

It's not an area of floor that is walked on much, but I'd like something that looks nice and is reasonably durable.

Pretty much all the ones I have looked at in pictures are higher that the floorboards which makes edging easier.

Is it okay to replace the broken and/or very modern bricks with old ones?

Given there is the wood burner, I'm wary of touching the bricks too close to the stand. If I'm laying bricks bank onto loose sand then not a problem, but if on lime then I need to move the wood burner or jack it up... is that hard?

 

[steveb]

I think we used NHL 3.5 - it was certainly bagged and then mixed with sand and water and then packed in and "smoothed" with the end of a piece of hosepipe to make the mortar lower than the bricks.

you might need to be careful of building regs for the hearth - I have a vague recollection that it needs to be raised in order to comply so you may end up popping all of the bricks up and re-laying on a bed of mortar , or laying the front row on it's side so you are moving from a simple task to a more destructive one. And maybe listed building consent - I guess a lot depends on your appetite for that and how much you can do without notifying anyone (could this be classed as a honest repair, and do repairs count - I haven't owned a listed building)

No experience in moving stoves but I guess if you asked an expert they would say "needs to be done by an expert"...

I think the biggest challenge (apart from bureaucrats) you have here is making it look like it hasn't been re-done - mine looks like it has been re-laid but I didn't have a lot of heritage to work from - whereas you have the opposite problem.

Here's the "before" picture of the same fireplace

and a "during"

and the after

 

[Zebra]

For the join between the floorboards and the brick fireplace, it is possible to make a filler out of sawdust and PVA. If you still have some of the wood from which the floor was made, you could use sawdust from that, and it will match the floor very well. It is also sandable once dry.
Or Gripfill. The solvent type, not the solvent-free one. Not very traditional, but it is strong, flexible, and a sort of dull greeny colour which doesn't draw attention to itself.
But if you are relaying the fireplace would it be possible to make it a little bit higher, so that it overlaps the floor? Then your joint would be between two things laid on top of each other, not adjacent to each other. A horizontal join, not a vertical one, sort of thing.

 

[xanthe]

We wouldn't be able to raise the height of the hearth at all. The bricks fit under the walls by almost an inch rather than butting up against them so would be a major re - think and I want to keep it very much as a clean and repair rather than any kind of 'rebuild' which might incur LBC or even worse building regs. This house doesn't begin to comply with those and I'd rather not give the poor inspector a heart attack!

The way that the edge of the hearth exactly matches the edge of the inside wall of the cellar is not helpful and neither is having the unfinished edge of a floorboard up against it. It's just a consequence of having a large cellar and the fireplace tacked onto the acknowledgement of the house rather than back to back inglenooks such as I'm a hall-housd

Steveb - that was some rebuild! And what a difference. Looks really nice. Interesting tip on the garden hose.

 

[bennoa1]

As the fire is raised you'll get away with NHL3.5. I get mine from Travis Perkins, but check they have stock before you venture down. I used 9 inch quarry tiles for our hearth (was previously as 2" deep slab of concrete) with about 10mm wide gaps between the quarries. Used sharp sand with small stone and when it was almost dry brushed the joints with a stiff broom head (an old one) which takes the surface off and exposes the small stones in the sand. Looks like its been there forever.
The brick pillars have all been cement mortared/pointed, so is that your next job? The pictures below are lime and its easy to see the difference in colour.

 

[steveb]

Not sure if the hose tip works on thin irregular joints though , these joints were relatively wide and regular so the hose put in a small concave indentation on the mortar - you'd have to try it to see if it makes it better or worse.

yes, the work was a bit of a "trigger's broom" job in the end - stylistically as well as structurally... It went from "fake pub chic" to "posh farmworkers cottage" in style - neither particularly authentic I would guess, but one is much more aligned to my taste

 

[xanthe]

We're tackling the exterior cement pointing - most of which is fortunately dropping off almost by itself although there has been some damage to the underlying timbers, but there is at least lime mortar and the weather has done it's bit towards degrading the cement.

Internally no such luck, and the pillars have several areas where you can see where they were used for sharpening knives. The CO has given me permission to tackle certain things like the cement pointing in the cellar and the cement either side of the front door as long I do the work, but the cellar has big blocks of Wealden sandstone and the faces are starting to spall so there is a conservation need to tackle those joints.

With the fireplace, no damage can be caused by the cement but a lot of damage could be done by trying to remove it. The bricks in the pillars in the upstairs fireplace have all had their faces terribly damaged by someone trying to remove cement from them.


The pink and black 'pub' look was certainly interesting! Please tell me you kept the horse brasses .

 

[xanthe]

A few developments on the hearth... potentially worrying.

Took a few more bricks up, moving in towards the centre, and have found that in that area, they laid a DPC - of the heavy black plasticey variety (bitumen?). On top of that 1.5" of cement and then the bricks on top of that.

Given that the edge of the hearth is directly in line with the inside of the cellar wall, the DPC has been laid directly on the sandstone blocks that make up the cellar walls. There are major issues with spalling on some of these blocks - the cement pointing isn't helping.

The DPC runs up to the edges and sides of the beams and the cement either side. The oak is rock solid down in the cellar, but is turning to sawdust in these areas.

There is also a metal grill set in among the bricks that drops into a pipe that exits halfway up the cellar wall. Any ideas why that should be there?

Should I just re-lay the bricks and leave this area well alone, or should I really have the woodburner removed, take up the all the cement and DPC and lay a proper lime base and re-lay the hearth with nice local bricks that aren't in pieces?

The person responsible even carved their initials into one of the bits of cement. Grrrr. :evil:

 

[Zebra]

You don't know for sure that it is the dpc which is causing the spalling of the sandstone blocks in the cellar. It is possible, but as they should be able to breathe into the cellar itself, then I would think the cement pointing is a more likely culprit.

The DPC runs up to the edges and sides of the beams and the cement either side. The oak is rock solid down in the cellar, but is turning to sawdust in these areas.

Excuse me if I'm being dim, (we zebras are not known for our intellectual capacities) but I'm not entirely sure what you mean here. The dpc runs up to which beams? Where is the oak which is bad? In the fireplace, or below?

As for the metal grill and pipe, is it possible that it was intended to supply fresh air to an open fire?

I'm afraid my inclination would be to investigate further. Otherwise you'll always worry. Removing the woodburner needn't mean dismantling the flue. You should be able to hold the flue while you undo the bolts fixing the flue onto othe fire, take the fire out, and then prop the flue up on some timber/scaffold stand. In fact, looking at your picture, your fire is on a stand. Could you get some strong pieces of timber and some car jacks/bricks, jack the fire up and take the stand out? Then you have to do all the work with it hanging there, so I think I'd be inclined to do the former.

Of course, the person who was perhaps annoyingly proud of their work laid that dpc for a reason. There was clearly damp arising in that area. Are those tiles at skirting level in the back of the fireplace in the estate agents pics? Have you taken them out? I take it there's no damp proof course in the walls of the chimney? Are those bricks damp? If you peel back a bit of the dpc is it sodden underneath? I take it there's no dpc in the walls of the house itself, and that this dpm in the fireplace doesn't overlap with any dpc in the walls? Are the walls of the house damp?

 

[xanthe]

The cement pointing is the major culprit, but the blocks directly under the fireplace area are in worse nick than some of those surrounding.

To explain the wood - the joists in the cellar are laid onto the ashlar blocks, so they jut out into the hearth by about 4". The DPM is cut so it fits round the joists - and then the cement poured onto both DPM and the joists. The joist ends are now flaky.

Metal grill and pipe - could well be. There was bits of candle wax, twigs and cobwebs when I cleared it out yesterday. I think they had a gas fire before as there is a gas pipe in the wall.

The tiles in the picture are pretty much just propped there. Doesn't feel damp. The DPC is dry underneath. There's an IDPC in the front wall of the house that the POs had done... grrrr... but there isn't one here.

The bricks all seem dry. The whole house is very dry - little bit of damp in the cellar but only if you put something on top of the areas and the moisture can't escape. There is a very badly done DPC down there on the front wall side - plastic with a foot of concrete on top - that we want to take up eventually. Everywhere is very well ventilated, especially as the sitting-room and dining-room floorboards are the ceiling of the cellar and the same in lots of other rooms.

Having discussed with husband, I think I'm going to go with taking it all up, removing the DPM and concrete and relaying in a lime bed with lime mortar. It will just irritate me forever if I leave it half done. I think I may need to call someone in to help me move the stove and perhaps do the floor for me.

On the upside, I thought I'd start stripping the paint of the walls, which is remarkably easy as they are such thick layers. The inside of the jambs hadn't been cement pointed and I found that using a tiny chisel, I've been able to remove the cement from the entire inglenook. Has taken all day, but I'm thrilled. One tiny bit of damage to one brick - literally a chip - but otherwise it has gone really well. It looks 1,000 times better even with just the lime mortar showing and should make a good first piece for my lime pointing experiments .

Now stripping the paint from the inside which has thrown up a few oddities: most of the funny shaped bits to the window side are just lumps of concrete and the wall is actually just smooth brick. I have no idea what they were up to doing that! The alcoves were also lime plastered as there are bits left along with chunks of blooming gypsum (I have a confession that it was my 3x great grandfather who invented Thistle brand plaster and first introduced plaster board to the UK. I curse my ancestor multiple times a day at the moment!). Oh, and everything is covered in some kind of red paint stuff that has oxidised into a rust colour (iron?).

The alcove areas aren't in particularly good shape under the paint and plaster, so I may need to think about replastering and lime washing the inside rather than bare bricks - or perhaps leaving the back as brick and the alcoves with plaster and limewash.

If anyone has ever had an inglenook revamped completely, do you have a rough idea of what it cost? Then I can keep husband happy about the mess with thought of dosh I am saving!