Hi all, so glad I found this forum. Might be a contentious one, especially for my first post! We have a farmhouse, circa 1700, according to our heritage guy, which we're gradually doing up. Plenty of alterations in 1950s-70s when it was sold outside the local estate. We've rectified the roof, guttering, and chased all the exterior cement out and replaced with lime. Also installed french drains at the front of the house (road level increase over the years, nothing more we can do about that). The village sits on a clay seam. We've had both historical and recent movement (heave, rather than subsidence). On top of all of this, we've had some sympathetic structural repairs and are confident that any further movement has been mitigated. Or certainly insured against...
So we've addressed the outside stuff, it's time to get to work on the inside. The room we're working on now has three exterior walls - about 1m thick, double stone with rubble infill. It's about 60msq. A lot of the inside of the wall has been compromised by faulty roof and guttering, now fixed. The room in question had modern plaster with a bitumen tanking system - newtonite lathe, probably from the 1950-60s behind it. We've stripped the room back to stone and intend to redo with lime. The floor is (was) an asphalt job over a concrete screed. I suspect because everything has been made watertight, it was pushing the water into the ground, causing the clay to swell and basically push the flooring skywards as it had no space to breathe.
I've dug a test pit in this particular room. About 2inches of bitumen, concrete, sand then some clay. Underneath all that, I think I've found a pretty rough cobblestone floor about a foot down (which would tally with the outside level, it's obviously been built up over the years). And there was I hoping for flagstones! We're fully prepared to dig up the entire floor, but how do we replace it? My first thought was suspended floor, then if we do have a heave problem in the future, we could just dig it out again. It's an occasional room, has an open working fireplace and plenty of draught from the single glazed mullions on two sides.
What would you do?
Thanks in advance!
So we've addressed the outside stuff, it's time to get to work on the inside. The room we're working on now has three exterior walls - about 1m thick, double stone with rubble infill. It's about 60msq. A lot of the inside of the wall has been compromised by faulty roof and guttering, now fixed. The room in question had modern plaster with a bitumen tanking system - newtonite lathe, probably from the 1950-60s behind it. We've stripped the room back to stone and intend to redo with lime. The floor is (was) an asphalt job over a concrete screed. I suspect because everything has been made watertight, it was pushing the water into the ground, causing the clay to swell and basically push the flooring skywards as it had no space to breathe.
I've dug a test pit in this particular room. About 2inches of bitumen, concrete, sand then some clay. Underneath all that, I think I've found a pretty rough cobblestone floor about a foot down (which would tally with the outside level, it's obviously been built up over the years). And there was I hoping for flagstones! We're fully prepared to dig up the entire floor, but how do we replace it? My first thought was suspended floor, then if we do have a heave problem in the future, we could just dig it out again. It's an occasional room, has an open working fireplace and plenty of draught from the single glazed mullions on two sides.
What would you do?
Thanks in advance!
