The walls as previously mentioned are made of hand made local bricks
from about 1890, held together with a lime mortar.
The lime mortar unlike most modern mortars used today is soft, which
has both advantages and disadvantages, the main advantage being that if
the walls move the brickwork tends to readjust itself rather than crack -
it just settles to a new shape. Disadvantages can be that the walls are
perhaps more prone to movement and as this happens mortar tends to get
deposited in the cavity, breaching the damp-course and making damp a
frequent problem in these houses.
Raking out the cavities was a job taken up fairly early in our
occupancy, while the down stair floors were still up. It is a tedious
process as you have to remove odd bricks for access, rake out the
reachable section of cavity, replace the brick and then move onto the next
section and of course while this is going on large sections of flooring
have to remain up, but if you want the walls to stay dry it has to be done
from time to time.
I suppose the other major task we undertook was replacing the walls
ties ( wall plates being mentioned in the section on floors ). The need
for new wall ties became obvious when upstairs, when you thumped the walls
with a fist or the flat of a hand a whole section of wall would sway a
little. We got a contractor to do the job and it actually seemed straight
forward enough. Holes were drilled through the wall from the outside to
the interior ( not all the way through ) and a stainless steel tie
inserted which was cemented in place using a resin. Apart from leaving
some pink holes in the brickwork the process seemed quick, straight
forward left little mess and worked, in that the walls no longer blow
around in the winds!
The Damp course for the house is a traditional layer of slate ,which in
most cases still seems to work and you will find my comments on the
foundations in the section on floors.