Chimney - and Lime plaster

[Keithj]

I'll second that. I was "advised" similarly by the excellent chap who did most of the lime work during our repairs. He promised to come out when we need him for big stuff, and has kept that promise on the two occasions we've called him - and fixed the problem each time. But for the little jobs I was given a few minutes instruction and then watched him at work for a while.

I'm a hopeless craftsman, but I can do a repair that isn't too incompatible with the rest (and works!). It's very satisfying, the job gets done now rather than later, and the cost is minimal. I have my very own little pots of lime putty (very cheap) and my own little lime worker's toolkit of float, spatula, trowel, sponge, "water pistol", cover cloths, and pot of the approved nails to hold the cloths to the oak timbers.

I have no fear of leccy work - been doing that all my life.

I imagine a lime course would be great fun!

 

[xanthe]

I envy people with no fear of electrics. For some reason they terrify me - I have been known wait till daylight and turn the whole house off at the mains to change a light bulb . No idea why as I'm the rewirer of plugs in this house and that doesn't phase me!

Is plaster dust in electric sockets dangerous?

Fab, I shall go ahead and have a go then. I have the Mike Wye DVD so that should be good for starters. It's not the kind of house that requires everything to be perfect like our last one - huge floor to ceiling windows are not kind to wonky walls, but here we are in semi permanent gloom...

 

[skier-hughes]

The benefit of a course to me, along with having a go with our lime plasterers was that I got to see the constituency of the plaster they were using, had a feel of it and then when I came to have a go myself I was much better prepared.

 

[Carol]

You could try your local council for lime courses, via a conservation officer. Down here they run day courses for home owners which repair local landmarks as a supervised practice session in the afternoon. My late husband learned and helped repoint the wall beside the church in Ilminster, Somerset some years ago.

Don't be afraid of lime work, it takes MUCH longer to set than the pink stuff so giving you plenty of time to make it look right and match what you have. Our old stuff was so wibbly wobbly, matching this was much simpler than the modern place I lived in temporarily before I came here, where a Polyfilla repair stuck out like a sore thumb!

 

[Keithj]

I envy people with no fear of electrics. For some reason they terrify me - I have been known wait till daylight and turn the whole house off at the mains to change a light bulb . No idea why as I'm the rewirer of plugs in this house and that doesn't phase me!

Leccy deserves respect, cos it'll bite you if you touch it. Once you understand it and how it works, it's a lot easier. The most important tool in your armoury (in my view) is one of those little neon screwdrivers - the ones that light up if you touch a live wire with them. Anything metal that you're thinking of touching: touch it with the neondriver first. If it lights up, investigate why. It may be something wired incorrectly, or to the wrong fuse, or with the wrong polarity. It's amazing what a bodging PO (or tenant) can do - been there, found it, fixed it - all the way to an earth connection that lit the neon. Bloke didn't know what to do with the earth lug, so joined it to the next lug... Lethal!

I don't know of any courses that will teach you what you really need: all the ones I've seen start with teaching you the modern regs, which weren't around when our period properties were first wired and hence aren't generally much help. If you're not comfortable doing it yourself, there may be a sympathetic local chap who knows what he's doing and appreciates period properties. I spent a few hours with a friend teaching him the bits he needed to know; he was comfortable enough at the end to rewire the lights in his "barn" office, and then got the local chap in to check/test them. They passed.

Is plaster dust in electric sockets dangerous?

As long as it's not metallic plaster, no. But hoovering it out is a good idea because it won't do the connections between plug and socket any good.

If I'm working on a wall with sockets on it, I usually remove the fuse (or switch off the breaker and tape over it), remove the socket from the wall, put the wires into choc block and tuck them back in the box. I take switches and sockets off the wall and let them dangle while I paint.

 

[Penners]

I just stick a bit of masking tape over the socket, to prevent dust entry.

If your socket is a bit choked with dust, I should stick the nozzle of the vacuum cleaner on it to suck the dust out. This shouldn't entail any risk, but to the doubly safe just switch off the mains before you do it.

My late mother-in-law used to believe that, if you left an empty socket switched on, the electricity leaked out.

 

[Keithj]

Wife's cousin had a cleaner who insisted on pushing matchsticks into the round-pin sockets they had, to stop the stuff leaking out. The spectrum of knowledge of leccy is quite wide!

 

[plasticpigeon]

I knew someone who when fault finding electrical problems on his car, would clamp mole grips over a wire to stop the current flow. It is quite misunderstood.

 

[Keith Bowman]

I knew someone who when fault finding electrical problems on his car, would clamp mole grips over a wire to stop the current flow. It is quite misunderstood.

But that is exactly what one should do because the things you seem to think are wires are really tiny tubes full of blue smoke. You can see this is true when the device breaks and the blue smoke escapes

 

[Keith Bowman]

PS I believe you used to be able to buy canisters of special blue smoke for recharging Lucas components

 

[xanthe]

I have no intentions whatsoever of becoming closer acquainted with anything electric - especially in this house.

We had an electrician out to look at the whole shebang and it is dreadful. There were corroded wires on the fuse board, places where neutral and earth were in the wrong bits, garden floodlights (9 of them) attached to the beams in the kitchen, seriously scary stuff going on down in the cellar with bare wires and a few other dodgy bits. Quite a few sockets come loose from the walls if you try and plug anything in...

According to the EA details, the house had recently been completely rewired and replumbed... true back in the early 70's but was a blatant fib.

Anyway, the decision is to move the fuse box somewhere less damp, strip all the wiring in the whole house out from top to bottom and start again.

Quote was around £10k. :shock: but probably reasonable...

 

[xanthe]

Couple of questions:

Sitting room wall:

Left and middle panels - plan is to repair the daub, re-plaster in lime and then a Farrow & Ball casein distemper on the top, conserving as much of the old as we can.

Right hand panel. This has nothing left at all and is just fibre board and hopefully the laths are still there behind it (they are in very good nick elsewhere). Should I daub and lime plaster the whole panel to match the others?





Inglenook:

Currently the inside walls and back are painted in a gazillion layers of gloopy off-white gloss (brick faces are perfect underneath), and the external jambs are bare brick but were painted at some point as traces still there.

Unfortunately brickwork has nasty cement pointing that would be too risky to remove.

Options:
(With all options, the inside would be prepared by stripping off all the gloop and all exposed cement pointing will be made to look like lime rather than the current dark cement).

A) inside and out as plain brick

B) lime wash/paint the inside, leave external jambs in plain brick.

C) lime wash/ paint the jambs, leave inside as plain brick

D) lime wash/ paint inside and out.

If going with the painted options, should they be properly plastered, or just lime washed/painted?

 

[Penners]

Should I daub and lime plaster the whole panel to match the others?

That would certainly be the best possible solution.

As regards the left and centre panels, they look pretty good to me. Do they really need to be replastered?

A) inside and out as plain brick

B) lime wash/paint the inside, leave external jambs in plain brick.

C) lime wash/ paint the jambs, leave inside as plain brick

D) lime wash/ paint inside and out.

Personally, I would never introduce paint into a working fireplace - particularly not one as vulnerable as limewash. It's bound to get regular grubby marks and will probably discolour due to heat, so you're setting up an endless amount of future work in keeping it all looking good. I recommend option A).

 

[xanthe]

Ah, the photograph shows the walls before I removed the 7 layers of wood chip paper...

It currently looks more like this:



Off to look for ways to strip paint from bricks.