wainscoting and plasterboard

[plasticpigeon]

Hell again. I'm still puzzling over whether lime plaster on internal brick is really a must. Many large old houses had wainscoting or wood panelling, but isn't that a bit like plasterboarding a brick wall? It's a reasonably impermeable covering held a short distance from a brick wall. Not quite dot and dab, but surely quite similar in function?

 

[JoceAndChris]

There are many people on this forum who go picking back to stone or whatever and redoing in lime. Good for them, it looks beautiful and they know they're giving their house the maximum chance to dry out and not have pools of damp trapped in invisible locations.

But I doubt if the Lords and Ladies ever gave breathability much thought, if any. If things fell down due to rot or damp have the builders make something new and fashionable!

Tiles, panelling, shells, leathers, feathers, fabric, thick paper layer after layer, have all been used and I'm sure would compromise the breathability in theory but may not cause actual problems. Those things all fall off when wet and rotten but you could argue that modern plaster does too.

Certainly I'm going for wallpapers and fabrics on walls that in places have patched gypsum onto the lime. There isn't any damp here ( except a bit in my sunken basement kitchen). If I had real damp problems I'd think differently.

 

[88v8]

Agree. Now we put an academic gloss on what was just a standard building method in times past. By luck as much as judgement, things worked or didn't. Wainscotting, suspended floors, over damp... eventually rotted. Over dry.... didn't. There's a church in Gloucester docks where the wood floor was replaced at great cost in the late c19, I think it was, and 15 years later had to come up again because it had rotted. Was replaced with solid. Things worked or they didn't, what worked in one buildng failed in another.

We like lime because we understand its breathability is good in allowing moisture to escape rather than damaging the surrounding brick or stone. And some of us like its texture.
Personally I wouldn't dream of putting plasterboard in our 1620 house. Flat, ugly. But I did in our 1920 house, because the walls were flat and it was papered. It's a matter of what suits the house and the style of decoration.
Most of our internal stone walls are bare. I had one lime-plastered - undulating finish, bagged, not flat - because I don't like too much stone, and intend to have another wall done in another room. Will be some stone, some plaster. My aesthetics, now.

Mind you, that's only my take on what suits; an owner of 1972 told us that when they bought the house, the walls were plastered... we see the traces... and papered. Must have been a hell of a thickness on there to smooth the stone walls, and the paper must have been pretty damp. Anyway, they had it all stripped, and the white paint blasted off the beams. Good... And then they repointed the whole house in cement doh...and put a dpm in the sitting room... doh... because their plaster stripping was not motivated by any academic understanding of lime, it was purely an aesthetic decision of the time.
Like wainscotting, panelling, etc.

Ivor

 

[Flyfisher]

Hell again.

Quite. :lol:

 

[JoceAndChris]

Just fascinating isn't it. Great post Ivor.


I could put up a piccy of a wall in extreme wetness. (feeling bit lazy so will just describe) 200 yr old stone exterior wall in the basement (the back of the house is built into a hill), 3 feet thick. Original pointing and layer upon layer of limewash directly on bare stone. One side is my scullery, the other side is a 19th C sunken brick built rainwater chamber that holds about 1000 l of water. This wall is green. The limewash has fallen off in many places. The mortar would just scoop out with the smallest pressure. Occasionally water runs through the wall, and pools on the floor. I think this has always been the case, and the 19th C inhabitants coped with it by putting on another layer of limewash. To put any kind of a fancy finish on this wall would be madness. You'd think that with a little bit of pressure the stone would crumble onto the floor. But, no, it's as hard as rock! It just shows that in some places the traditional simple limewash finishes are the absolute best.

 

[tobydog]

In the words of Winston Churchill - "If you are going through hell, keep going".

 

[Zebra]

In the words of Winston Churchill - "If you are going through hell, keep going".