horror story

[rebeccac]

Well it seemed too good to be true - we've dug out a French drain at the back of the house , dug out the floor in the sitting room , chipped off acres of cement from inside the kitchen and just when it seemed that we might almost be ready to start on the kitchen plastering we found this!

In 2 corners of the room there appears to be big holes that have been filled in with earth instead of stone!

It's clay and its very wet so now we have no cement over it the water is coming out onto the edges of the brick floor.We cannot imagine why we have found these earth filled holes but both are at the base of what was originally a stone archway of a church ( our house was once opart of a small church but it was turned into a house about 100 years ago.) We think that possibly there was a stone feature in the corners and that was taken out when the dividing wall was constructed and the holes filled with earth ?

Anyway we now think we should take up the enitre floor and re-lay it onto a limecrete base so its about 10 cms higher we can then fit in a french drain that goes out through the wall to take water from these 2 wet areas away from the walls/floors.

Another factor is the dividing wall has no foundations so we cannot dig down in case we undermine it!

Any suggestions?

As the picture shows we have removed the bricks from around the edges of the room ( to re-lay) and the earth I mention is in the wall not just on the floor covereing an area of about 1ft x 1ft.

 

[MdB]

I certainly wouldn't call it a horror story so relax a little.

Before our house had a number of concrete floors put down, the floor was just dirt on top of clay with a layer of sand on the top. The other houses in our road were similar. Have a stone or similar floor would have been considered very posh.

A few more pictures would be useful to give (inexpert) advise but the idea of a french drain and a non concrete permeable finish sounds sensible to me. You do want to be careful of drying out clay though as it shrinks as it drys which can cause subsidence.

 

[rebeccac]

[ATTACH type="full" alt="P1020571.jpg

The kitchen

This is the room - the problem is not that the bricks are directly on earth they are actually laid on a primitive cement with what look like crushed chalk small stones and lime ? It's the infill of earth that is in the wall and is wet and has taken the place of a stone at least 1ft x 1ft in size.

The room on the other side of the wall is part of another house and has a floor about 1ft higher than our floor which is poured concrete.We cannot alter that.


[attachment=1]P1020571.jpg"]1[/ATTACH]

 

[rebeccac]

in the last picture the area where the ladder is has the big hole filled with earth.

 

[Penners]

Good advice, there, from MdB. I certainly wouldn't panic and dig up your whole floor, particularly if these are the only wet areas. If the rest of the clay floor under the concrete is stable and seems happy, then to dig out the concrete and lay limecrete just might change its currently stable situation. Think sleeping dogs....!

It's difficult to see very much on your photos but on the basis of your description, I think you might be able to install a short porous drain into each of the wet pits, and duct these out through the wall and away from the building. Then cover just those drained pits with gravel and limecrete.