Newfound Fireplace needs a lot of TLC - help !

[stuartmack]

Hello all

Great forum, hoping you can help.

We have a 180 year old cottage in South Wales. We recently removed the electric fire and after much smashing about, we eventually found the original opening. It’s a decent size, about 1.2 m wide. I’ve re pointed the sides in lime putty, but the internally the rest of it’s a real mess. The cottage is rubble stone and it’s falling away at every turn. It looks as though they’ve smashed through the fireplace at some point to fit an old back boiler, so only the edges of the back are original stone, the rest is modern brick. Also there are fairly large voids where the boiler pipes ran through the fireplace.

So I’m not sure what to do. I can throw a load of cement into the voids, and pretty up by lime pointing the front facing side. Real problem is the rear. Maybe cladding stone pinned into the brick?

It’s never going to look pretty, 200 years of soot ain’t going nowhere. Guess I could also bag it all in lime and wash in a colour that may hide some of the soot seepage?

Any help most welcome. Cheers

 

[Crazycacti]

I've got lots of this kind of thing with my rubble walls. Some areas of loose stone on the inner sleeve and voids. My stone is slate which leads to some pretty large voids when you are trying to point the walls.

My fixes have included raiding skips - permission ofc - of people having work done nearby for the Manx stone and overnight gaining magical powers that allow me to transform into a mason. I use the stones to build up the voids using nhl 3.5 as a mortar (no such thing as lime putty or NHL 2 on the Isle of Man). I started on an outbuilding and experimented with different mixes - some quite wet, some much drier, different thicknesses etc... once I realised you could get away with quite a bit more than people are led to believe I started stabilising the house walls where required and filling voids.

It takes time choosing the stones and dressing them a little but the end result has never so far been noticeable. Once in the gable end on our 3rd floor some loose stones revealed a large piece of wood randomly in the wall. No where you would expect a purlin so god knows what the craic was there back in the day but that took some filling. It now loks the same as the rest of the wall and is as solid as can be.

I'd try and locate some similar stone and just have a go personally. It doesnt look too bad at all.

 

[TheSpid]

Don't fill the voids with cement. Use more stone and lime. Our chimney was in a sorry state and needed rebuilding - stone and lime is the way to go. It looks pretty to me but then I really like old and rustic And stone and brick look nice - it's part of the the history. I wouldn't 'cover' it - it will look false.

If you bag it, cover the soot in cow dung first or it will leech through the lime.

There are a couple of lime specialists down your way [google will find then - I did have them saved but they won't come as far north as me so I unsaved them] who will help you.

 

[CliffordPope]

It looks pretty to me but then I really like old and rustic And stone and brick look nice - it's part of the the history. I wouldn't 'cover' it - it will look false.

I agree. Likewise I wouldn't bother too much about the soot stains. just clean it off as best you can, and patch up the holes with new stonework. The contrast of old stonework, repaired stonework, and old brickwork shows the history.
Then if you have your own fire there it will slowly acquire a new patina overlay, and look like a period house that's been lived in for aeons.

 

[worms]

The original stone for a rubble construction building will normally be very local, so you perhaps don’t need to go far to find infill stone for the gaps (and I don’t mean unmatched stone from a skip!). I’ve found plenty of matching bits either loose in the garden or in the various garden walls.