Behind the plaster

We always knew that successfully integrating modern building techniques and passivhaus technologies into a very old solid brick walled house was going to be one of the key challenges of this build. What we didn’t know was what would be lurking behind the charming inner skin of our Victorian house.

6 weeks into the build and with the innards fully exposed, we are only now properly understanding what we are dealing with. It seems that, just as today, the Victorian construction industry had more than its fair share of cowboy builders. The skeletons in our closet include:

• woodworm in almost every piece of timber in the house
• structural columns sitting on mid-air, supported by precisely nothing
• brickwork that looks more like pebble-dash than a wall
• 6cm gaps between first and second brick layers on external walls
• bowed walls throughout (which are particularly trying when applying insulation)

The non-British members of our building team don’t know whether to laugh or cry at some of the “workmanship” we are uncovering.

And of course, all of these hidden surprises have implications, both in terms of the build cost and our plans. In particular, our airtightness and thermal bridge strategy has had to adapt almost daily to the new discoveries.

Luckily, we have a tendency to look on the bright side! We consider these experiences to be the best way of generating invaluable know-how for the upcoming task of dealing with the thousands of similar buildings throughout the country. And it means that our engineers have something to challenge their ever-active minds - wouldn’t want them to take life too easy!

One downside worth mentioning is the additional steel we are deploying to correct these structural problems (we will write more about steel and embodied energy later in the build). Partly as a result of this, we are starting to investigate more closely the use of structural timber, so if anyone out there has advice or expertise in this area, we would very much like to hear from you.